


I Need Your Help Like I Need Blood Loss

by shippingmyarmada



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Fight Sex, Fist Fights, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, So much angst, Steve is an angsty teen, Unreliable Narrator, and he's not a soft boi tm in this sorry, bc Neil is Neil, just a little, king steve is back, like very unreliable, not to give anything away but like... dont trust him
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-07-11 02:35:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15962870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shippingmyarmada/pseuds/shippingmyarmada
Summary: Billy Hargrove hadFlight Riskwritten across every inch of his skin. He hadTroubleetched into his bones.Dangeron the tip of his tongue and across bruised knuckles.He was the kind of guy that was more trouble than he was worth, more dangerous than the Hawkins woods at night. He was a fire encased in tan skin. He was the drop of your stomach when you miss the last stair.He was the enticement of a cliff’s edge, the part of Steve begging him to make that final step over the edge into the dangerous depths of the unknown. To his doom.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this was bouncing around my head because of Chromeo by cleopatrick, Blue Moon by Chase Huglin, and Suburban Dreams by Twin Wild. Title from Rolling With The Punches by The Blue Stones, also a very Harringrove song.

Billy Hargrove flew into town in a haze of red dust and the chorus of a too-loud car engine. From the second he revved into the high school parking lot, months late to school and long blond hair lifted by the cool autumn wind, Steve couldn’t keep his eyes off. He walked through the halls with that easy confidence Steve knew everything about, arm around a girl Steve couldn’t remember the name of. Caught Steve’s attention by force, all jests and elbows and strong body knocking him down on the court. Refused to let up, gave Steve no peace in the showers nor the classes they shared, pushing and teasing and snickering from the back of the room when Steve inevitably got the answers wrong.

Billy Hargrove was going to cause him trouble, Steve knew it as soon as he caught his eye. 

It was inevitable, that fight in the Byers’ house. Like the inevitability of a wave crashing onto sand, of the sun coming home in the summer, of the stars peeking out behind an overcast nightfall, of the monsters lurking in the looming trees of rural Indiana. They were drawn together like magnets a hair out of reach, twitching and twitching until they flew together in a violent collision of fists and the red taste of copper.

Steve Harrington led a planned life. He rebelled in high school, just enough to be popular and draw those easily impressed in with a shotgunned beer and a loose cigarette. Not enough to be compared to a boy with a sharp smile and His parents were absent just enough to be intriguing, not quite enough for anyone to bother checking in. He wore Ray-Bans indoors, paired with the sweaters that made moms think he was innocent. Snuck into girls’ bedrooms through windows left unlocked for him. 

He would go to some Midwestern college, not too far away and easy to get into with a little flash of his father’s money when the latter thought Steve wouldn’t know better. He would graduate after four years of extended hell, barely passing grades and more parties than he could count. He would come home to Hawkins after, live a year in an apartment paid for with checks his father awarded him for doing next to nothing in the family business. 

He’d be married by twenty-three, a kid not long after, and any thought of a life he’d like dead on the night of his wedding. His father would gift him the deposit for a conservative starter house that still costs more than most of Hawkins could afford, he’d move into some McMansion like he grew up in by the time his wife had popped out their second child.

Steve Harrington lived a life he didn’t get a real choice in, and it never bothered him until Nancy, the girl he’d thought he could live that planned life with, had ripped his heart out and spit on it in some stranger’s bathroom. _Bullshit_

He _knew_ his life was fake, bullshit, a show, _whatever,_ but Nancy had been real. Until she wasn’t, was just another lie that he was trying to keep together with clumsy fingers and kid’s glue. Until she told him their love wasn’t real, was only his, was _bullshit,_ and ran off with Jonathan. Again. 

Nancy Wheeler left Steve reeling. She had entered his life as a sacred virgin, waiting to be defiled by the _King._ Left it as someone completely different, traumatized, broken, damaged. A cheater. She was unlike anything Steve had ever had before, in the girls of Hawkins, Indiana. Left him _changed._ Now he had a group of kids who hung off him, who relied on him, who cared if he died in Hawkins’ dark underbelly. And he gave a shit about them, too. It was Nancy’s fault. In the end, she’d ruined him. The first thing he’d ever had that said _no_ and chose the school creep over _King Steve._

Billy Hargrove had _Flight Risk_ written across every inch of his skin. He had _Trouble_ etched into his bones. _Danger_ on the tip of his tongue and across bruised knuckles. 

He was the kind of guy that was more trouble than he was worth, more dangerous than the Hawkins woods at night. He was a fire encased in tan skin. He was the drop of your stomach when you miss the last stair. 

He was the enticement of a cliff’s edge, the part of Steve begging him to make that final step over the edge into the dangerous depths of the unknown. To his doom.

And Steve couldn’t _stay away._

But he could pretend. 

He could pretend, broken and battered and in so much pain he couldn’t see straight when he finally woke up and the monsters in the woods had been vanquished supposedly for good this time, that he could stay away from Billy after he’d gotten the shit beat out of him. He could pretend, for the two weeks he was given off basketball to recover, that he wasn’t drawn to Billy like a moth to a flame, intent on burning himself alive. He could hide behind the bleachers during lunch, chainsmoking menthols for a meal and eyeing the trunk of his car where he had two bats stashed away. He could avoid Nancy and Jonathan like the plague, in the halls and picking up the kids from the Hawkins Middle and from all the different houses. 

He’d made a promise, to Mrs. Henderson, that he’d keep an eye on Dustin. She’d called him, frantic the morning after the world had ended, oblivious and afraid because she couldn’t get ahold of Joyce and she _knows how much Dustin looks up to you, Steve,_ and was wondering if he knew where he was. 

He’d gone home, that night, after everything was over. When there was blood in his mouth and his eyelids held weights so heavy he could hardly keep them open as the road swerved in front of his Beemer. He’d first driven the dented Camaro back to the Byers’, filled to the brim with battered kids. The wood block that allowed the redheaded one to drive abandoned in the field with what Steve assumed was all of his will to live. 

The kids had been silent, Max especially. Her blue eyes wide and staring as the others drifted off in the back seat.

“He’ll kill me,” she’d whispered to Steve, to the darkness that surrounded them all, to the wisps of sunrise. “He’ll kill me.”

Steve had said, “No, he won’t,” because it was the only option. He had no clue what Billy would do, but that wasn’t the point. Max was so young in that moment, just a wide eyed kid, so different from what he’d seen in the rare occasions he interacted with the little spitfire. 

She’d stayed silent after that. Even when they’d reached the Byers’ to find everyone else already there, without her brother. Billy had vanished like a ghost in the night, leaving only a syringe with a bent needle in his wake.

Steve drove her home in the Camaro. Watched as she snuck in through a back window. Waited until her light turned on, then off again. Hopper picked him up down the road, silent and unwavering in his pickup. 

When Steve finally got home, he’d fallen asleep on the couch, only to be woken by the shrill panic in Mrs. Henderson’s voice a mere three hours later. With heavy bags under his eyes and a cup of coffee, he’d picked up Dustin and brought him home. The little shit hadn’t even gone to sleep. Didn’t bother calling his own damn mother. 

From that point on, he’d been appointed Dustin Henderson’s keeper. 

For the first time in possibly his life, Steve Harrington was well and truly alone. Having destroyed his friendship with Tommy and Carol, he avoided them in the halls, too. Now all he had was a gaggle of fucked up kids who were much too annoying for their own good and a middle aged woman who pushed cookies into his hands every time he dropped Dustin off at home or promised to cart him to DnD. He was alone. And everything was messed up. He couldn’t go back to who he was, what he was, before everything had happened. The world had ended, stopped moving under Steve’s feet, abandoned him in a place he didn’t quite recognize.

But as it always does, the sun rose in the mornings and set in the evenings, and Steve had to go back to basketball. 

_Pretty boy._

Billy hadn’t given him a second to recover, to get back into the sport. His lungs screamed as he ran, bruises still running deep into his ribs. He’d pushed himself during warm ups, made his legs burn and his stomach roll. 

“Missed you, Harrington,” Billy had snarled in his ear, bare chest flush against Steve’s clothed back, “Tommy can’t keep up for shit.”

They both knew it was a lie. They both knew Billy had bruises that mirrored Steve’s.

“Then _fucking play,_ Hargrove,” he’d taunted back, shouldering Billy as rough as his groaning joints would allow.

“There’s that fire,” Billy had said, low enough for only Steve to hear. Like it was their secret. Like that night was something Billy got to smile and lick his lips remembering. 

Billy had run his hand against Steve’s side as he stole the ball, pressing hard into the ribs he found, like he _knew_ they were still tender. Caught him hard enough that Steve stumbled, feet clumsy and unwilling.

Billy Hargrove had bruises that Steve didn’t cause. They were too fresh, too big, too _boot shaped._

Billy Hargrove was _trouble._

Despite that, Steve didn’t protest when Billy pushed him around. He just pushed back. Harder than he would’ve, had he still been with Nancy and still stuck in this idea that his life had a purpose. Stuck in the idea that he was fine with being a puppet in his own story. That getting married and having kids and living in Hawkins forever was something he wanted, instead of something he was stuck in. 

Steve went to parties again. He routinely got drunker than Nancy on the night she broke it off, sloppy and angry at the whole damn world. Drunk and looking for _trouble._ Trouble with the name Billy Hargrove and a wolfish smile. 

 

Billy had him by the throat, thick fingers curled around his beating heart. Chest shoved against the driver’s side door, door handle digging uncomfortably into his thigh, Steve was trapped. The hand on his neck wasn’t squeezing, wasn’t holding to its threat, just _there._ Showing him it _could._ Steve could feel the entirety of Billy’s rigid body, pressed hard against every plane of his own. It was like practice, rough and intimate and cruel, but at the same time it wasn’t. It was so much more than at practice. More intimate. More intimidating. Dangerous.

The worst part about the whole thing was that it was _hot._

Possibly the hottest thing Steve had encountered in his young life. And his tight jeans were not going to keep his secret the second he got flipped around for a fist to the face. So he did what any teenage boy with a death wish would do. He ground his ass back into Billy’s crotch. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Steve had come to the party for a fight or a fuck or at least to get drunk off his ass. 

He’d come with Billy set in his sights. The asshole was the only person left on the planet that seemed to make Steve able to _feel_ something. Even if it was mostly pure hatred and annoyance. But it wasn’t the haunting numbness that came from saving the world and no one knowing about it except for some stupid kids. He was stuck in those blue eyes and how he could set them ablaze. The whole thing was a better accelerant than any amount of alcohol. 

They’d danced this dance before. Starting on opposite sides of a raucous party, booze in their hands and fire in their eyes. They’d circle one another for hours. Like predators stalking their prey, they would wait, hunt, seeth. Then it would happen. Suddenly, like ripping off a bandaid, Billy would push too hard, Steve would get too close, and there would be fists in the air. It was always in the back of whoever’s house it was, in the cold winter air, away from prying eyes and the attention Billy constantly craved.

Three times since the initial bloodlust at the Byers. Three times Steve had left a party with unexplainable bruises and a high soaring through his veins. Three times, they’ve only gone far enough to push boundaries. They haven’t gotten nearly as close to unbridled rage, to the loss of control, as they had in the Byers’ house.

This was _fun._ This was rough and tumble boys fighting because they _could._ Fighting for the adrenaline. For the feeling of losing who you are for at least a second. Fighting to feel something.

Steve had forgiven Billy for the Byers’ incident when the latter had given him a free first hit. Got him right in the mouth, split his lip with the force of a swing. This was _different._

“Steve,” Dustin had said, when he’d showed up to Hawkins Middle to drive him home, “What the fuck happened? You’re a _lover,_ Steve, not a _fighter._ ”

And Steve had laughed at him, meaner than intended, when he said, “Since fuckin’ when, dickhead?”

Because Dustin had no _clue_ who Steve Harrington was, not really. He hadn’t been there to patch up his busted lip after Jonathan, after the dozens of scraps he’d gotten into over the years. That had all been Steve. Dustin only witnessed his failure with Billy, his adventures with a spiked baseball bat under a heavy night sky. That alone should tell him that Steve Harrington was a _fighter._

But Dustin Henderson was a stupid kid who’d only ever seen him play nice, only ever seen his protective side. Only been on the receiving end of mean mothering, only been behind someone willing to go first, to sacrifice himself for the kids who trailed behind. 

Steve Harrington was a _fighter_ and he was going to prove it until he felt something again. 

Dustin didn’t need the details. He needed someone to drive him home and to eat dinner next to someone as abandoned as himself. He needed a makeshift older brother, and Steve Harrington knew how to be what everyone else wanted or needed. 

Billy faltered, fingers tightening for a split second before slipping to the back of Steve’s neck and _pushing._ Shoving his face further into the cold glass as he rolled his hips hard in response. His breath was hot on Steve’s neck before he bit down on the exposed flesh, hard and mean. Almost hard enough to draw blood. 

“Is this what you fucking wanted, pretty boy?” He’d growled, teeth threateningly close to Steve’s ear. It was enough to make Steve’s blood boil beneath his skin. To bring more heat licking the back of his throat. To make his pants painfully tight. He ground back harder, with a groan. “Shoulda just said so. Waste of my _fuckin’_ time,” Billy continued. The sharp scent of alcohol was on his breath, hot on the side of Steve’s face. Steve could taste it in the cold winter air. 

It was then that Steve knew _why_ Billy Hargrove was going to cause him trouble. 

Because Billy Hargrove was trouble in blue jeans. He was sinful hips and sharp roughness, he was everything Steve wasn’t supposed to want. It just made him want it more. 

With a rough hand behind his back, Steve grabbed one of Billy’s and shoved it unceremoniously to the front of his pants. Groaned when Billy really caught on, hands almost as rough then as when he was throwing punches.

They were out in the open, painfully obvious in the drunk dark of night. Only hidden from the rest of the party by a blue Camaro. It was dangerous. It made Steve’s head spin more. It was _intoxicating._

Billy thrived on that danger. That sense of impending doom, the threat of being caught. It was like a drug for Steve, already too caught up and lost in his own body. He was caught up in the sharp roll of Billy’s hips rutting against his ass, the frozen metal on his cheek, the panting breath in his ear. 

They didn’t talk, after. Only shoved away, Billy to his Camaro, too fucked to drive but doing it anyway, Steve back into the belly of the beast. 

Twitching, twitching. They would collide again. The inevitability struck Steve early in the morning as he walked through snow to get home. Billy felt like coming home, in some fucked up way. It was rough and easy and everything Steve didn’t know he needed. 

Billy found him again three nights later, a midnight hour encased in a coffin of darkness, tucked away in a diner’s booth. He was drinking coffee mixed with a milkshake, lukewarm sludge that only somewhat quenched his need for sugar and caffeine. Billy had slid into the booth across from him, unlit cigarette between sharp teeth. Daring someone to challenge him.

“What’s a pretty boy like you doing out so late, Harrington?” He’d asked, heat on his tongue. The smirk on his lips didn’t falter the the whole time, not when he filched the remaining milkshake from under Steve’s nose, not when sharp blue eyes connected with brown.

He lit Steve on fire, with that smirk. “I could ask you the same thing, Hargrove,” he’d said, daring.

Billy ignored him, “The night’s dangerous for a princess, Harrington. You’re asking to run into what goes bump in the night. There’s monsters in this world, pretty boy.”

“Like you?” 

“Like me.” There was something that bordered on wicked in those blue eyes. Something that drew Steve in. Made his heart beat fast with the threat of danger, made his pants tight with the same thought. 

He slapped a few bills on the table as he fled, Billy Hargrove hot on his heels. 

Billy Hargrove was everything Steve wasn’t supposed to do. He wasn’t who rich kids with college funds and bad grades were supposed to hang around. They had a _history_ as Dustin would say. 

Worst of all, he was a _boy_ and pretty rich boys weren’t supposed to like getting head from other boys. 

He didn’t give a shit if Steve was jealous or cruel or bitter or fucked up, didn’t care if Steve partied too much or too hard, if he wore his shades inside and ripped his pretty sweaters on low hanging branches as he ran in the night, if Steve wanted pain with his pleasure, if Steve wanted to change or if he needed to. He couldn’t care less if Steve wasn’t a picture perfect prince in a small town, because Billy Hargrove wasn’t perfect, either. He was _worse._ Billy had no grandiose sense of self worth, no desire to be anything more than what he was, no need for perfection like Nancy had had. 

It was intoxicating.

To be nothing more than who he was, what he wanted, when he wanted. To be accepted as that. 

So Steve drank his fill of Billy Hargrove. 

Drank until he was drowning in it. Until Dustin looked at him and said, “What the fuck Steve? You’re _smiling,_ ” when he was driving the Beemer through country roads, unaware of his own lips. 

“Am I not allowed to be happy about something, or do I need your permission, asshole?” Steve had shot back, schooling his mouth back into neutral. 

Dustin had paused for a long time, staring out the window and not dignifying Steve’s sentiment with a response. Eventually he asked, “Did you get a girlfriend?”

And the kid had the nerve to almost sound _hurt._

“Something like that,” was all Steve could say. All he wanted to say. But the damn kid looked like he could cry right there. “It’s nothing, okay kid? I’ll still be a bachelor with you, or whatever. I’m just blowing off some steam.”

Which made Dustin gag, “Gross, dude.”

“Whatever, dickhead.”

He slapped that stupid baseball cap down to cover Dustin’s eyes and retreated before he got smacked by a flailing limb.

Later, on the drive home from the Byers’ family dinner that Steve kept getting forced into despite the way that seeing Jonathan and Nancy holding hands beneath the table made him want to puke, Dustin said, “I’m glad she’s not letting you get into fights anymore.”

Steve had laughed, the absurdity of Dustin’s claim inescapable. He was still getting in fights, he thought, just ones that were more competitive and hidden from prying eyes and always ended in a mess that wasn’t blood. In a way, these fights with Billy were worse, more dangerous than the ones with fists ever had been. Because this time, Billy had a grip in Steve’s cracked open chest, and if he wanted he could wreck him worse than before with a twist of his wrist. 

Billy Hargrove was a lion in the night, huge and proud and roaring, but out of his element when the blanket of darkness covered Hawkins. Steve was a sacrificial lamb, only made aware of his doom when his keeper him abandoned him to his fate. The lion had not eaten him whole, as he suspected, but rather gnawed the constraints loose. Set the lamb free to face a world much worse than a planned life of boredom. A life where monsters came alive in the woods and Billy Hargrove had fingerprint bruises on his throat that weren’t from Steve.

It hadn’t been solely Nancy nor Billy’s fault, this change in Steve’s perspective. It was a combination of the two, with a dash of _oh shit, I’m going to die and this is all I’ve done?_

Billy had come to him one night, gnashing teeth and begging for a fight. Rivulets of blood ran over his lips from his nose. Or, well, he hadn’t _come_ to Steve. But he hadn’t fled, and that was almost the same thing. He’d found Steve in the woods behind his house, nailed bat in hand and looking for a confrontation with _something._ The fact that it could be Billy was just icing on the cake. 

But Billy hadn’t left, cracked open and raw in the light of a full moon. With blood in his teeth, Billy said, “The fuck are you doing out here?”

“It’s my fucking property, Hargrove, you’re the one who doesn’t belong here.” He’d been mean, biting out the words even as the blood in Billy’s teeth made his skin crawl because he _knew_ something wrong was happening but he couldn’t place what it was. He just knew it was _wrong._

“You’re not telling me to leave,” Billy snarled, closing the distance between them with an easy step.

“Get out of here,” Steve had said, because he could. 

“You don’t want me to.” Billy was crowding him in, pushing him back, trying his hardest to prove his dominance when he was so obviously lacking control.

“I want you to leave me the fuck alone,” Steve replied, pushing back with his chest, using the miniscule height difference to his advantage. 

“Liar.”

Billy tasted like copper. Like licking a frozen pole in the winter on a dare and getting your tongue stuck. Ripping away would hurt just the same, taking a layer of skin and a harsh bite of pride.

And Steve couldn’t help but think, _you knew where you were, you knew this was my home, you knew I’d be out here, and you came anyway._

That night marked the start of something else, a shift in the fight some could call a relationship. Billy followed Steve home like a lost puppy after jumping his bones in the snow covered woods. It was different. But Billy still didn’t give a shit if Steve did whatever the hell he wanted, so he didn’t protest. 

“Don’t you have parents?” Billy had asked when Steve pushed open the back door to a house with all the lights on. 

He’d laughed bitterly. “Barely.” 

Steve expected something other than what he got when he looked at Billy’s face for the first time in real light. He knew there would be blood, he could taste it when they’d kissed. He wasn’t expecting Billy Hargrove, asshole extraordinaire, to look almost wistful when he muttered, “Shit, man.”

“How’d you break your nose?” Steve asked, ignoring the clawing that made his throat tight and painful. He tried to make it sound chill, but even he could hear the failure.

“It’s not broken,” Billy had said, walking to the kitchen and coating one of Steve’s mom’s expensive dish towels in water dampened blood. “I know what a damn broken nose feels like, and it ain’t this.”

“Wrong answer, dude. Who didn’t break your nose, then?” Because Steve had a sneaking suspicion that he _knew_ the answer already, and that idea made him feel ready to puke.

Billy was shifty, dampening the ruined cloth under hot water from the kitchen sink with hands that _almost_ could be shaking if Steve didn’t know better. Billy was a wild animal caught in a trap, and this time Steve wasn’t the prey. He was the predator, he was the lion, and Billy Hargrove had sad eyes under all that anger. “I fell,” Billy said, seeing the cogs turning in Steve’s brain, knowing that the other boy was on the brink of figuring out what he was usually so good at keeping secret.

“Bullshit.”

“I don’t fucking lie, Harrington,” Billy growled, advancing on him. The now pink towel made a loud splat as Billy flung it into the sink. 

“Then tell me.”

“It’s none of your damn business.”

“You’re in _my_ house. I could make you leave whenever I want,” Steve reminded him, letting the hot anger boil in him again. He was too damn tired for this.

“You can’t make me do anything, princess,” Billy had said, advancing again. Pushing Steve back into the counter. Daring him with burning blue eyes. 

Steve didn’t let up. 

They stared for a long minute, each daring the other to call uncle, to end whatever they were doing, to take the easy way out. Steve still didn’t let up. Billy caved first. “I didn’t plant my _fucking_ feet. He caught me off guard and I ate shit. Went face first into a bookshelf. I don’t fucking lie, Harrington.”

It was all he needed. Steve wondered if Billy had been begging for someone to ask, to push, to figure it out. To tell someone. If that was why he’d sought him out in a woods Billy claimed to hate. So someone else would know his secret. 

The truth was, though, Steve thought, that Billy Hargrove never hid it, no one ever cared enough to question further. 

Steve’s empty stomach rolled uncomfortably.

Billy was gone in the morning, blankets abandoned on the couch he’d slept on. A ghost in the night that Steve wasn’t actually sure had ever been there at all.

He still can’t quite believe that Billy was anything more than a figment of his own imagination when he has a pile of blankets in his arms that smell like expensive cologne, cigarettes, and blood. 

The winter air stung Steve’s cheeks when he dared go out in it, but he drove with all the windows down anyway. He has a spiked baseball bat hidden behind the passenger seat, but he’s not sure where the monsters live, anymore. He knows they aren’t confined to the woods.

Billy kissed him on the mouth in the back of a party, shoved into a coat closet. Dustin flicked the hickey that followed, loud and obnoxious in a car he kept too cold. Billy dared him, threatened him, pushed him, changed him. Billy kissed him with an open mouth, was rough, but kissed him on the head when he’d thought Steve was asleep one night.

Billy Hargrove was _trouble_ and Steve couldn’t get enough.

Billy stopped aiming punches at Steve after that night in the Harrington house. He didn’t get any less dangerous. Arguably, the danger was upped tenfold, when Steve stopped kissing him like it would hurt the other boy. When the competition turned into one of tongues and teeth and the occasional softness instead of one of fists and mean sex. 

When Steve looked over at Billy one night, in the backseat of his Beemer with his pants still shoved down to his thighs and thought _shit, he’s beautiful,_ with those pretty red lips sucking on a cigarette. The worst part, Steve thought, is that it was objectively true, even if Steve hadn’t really noticed before. 

It had made that hot lick of jealousy that had mostly stuck with Nancy and their failed relationship creep up Steve’s throat. Because like Nancy, Billy could have whoever he wanted, he could leave Steve in his red dust just as easily as he showed up in it. 

His hair was tinged red-purple in the low light, face cast in shadow as the end of his cigarette glowed red. He was casual ease, taking up as much space as possible and still untucked from those tight blue jeans. He was so damn pretty it made Steve want to stop right there, to flee, to end it before it would end him. That enticing step off a cliff had suddenly already passed him by, and now Steve was rushing down toward his fate in a mad scramble for purchase. It was only a matter of time before Billy left his life, and noticing how he looked like he wasn’t a monster in the glow of a sunset wasn’t helping. Noticing the sickly green bruises and the way he watched the forest like it would eat him alive if he ever stopped scowling didn’t help either. 

That moment, surrounded by somber woods and under a fading sunset, made it all the more threatening, to be with a boy with golden skin and curls in any way that didn’t involve fists. 

Billy Hargrove was _trouble._

Steve knew it from the start. He was going to cause Steve trouble. The latter just hadn’t known it would be with his lips instead of his fists on that first day he blew into Hawkins. 

 

Steve Harrington had a baseball bat, and he knew which pickup belonged to Neil Hargrove. Dustin Henderson was too smart for his own good. He caught on the second Steve picked him up in the morning with a hickey on his neck and twitching fingers when they passed the same parking lot twice without the latter noticing. 

“Whatever the hell you’re gonna do, I’m in,” he’s said, digging around in that overstuffed backpack.

“Not today, kid,” Steve responded, “One day.”

And Dustin accepted it. Accepted something he had no clue about, solely because Steve was the one leading him in. He’d seen monsters from another world, he could deal with whatever was in Steve’s head. He’d seen monsters in the woods, and he still wanted that adrenaline kick of being with friends and saving the world again.

Steve was failing his classes, and couldn’t bring himself to give a shit. Not when the world ended and he had a pretty boy sucking his dick and his life meant nothing anyways. 

Weeks passed with more snow, blankets covering Hawkins in white and burning Billy alive. Steve could taste that heat, that passion, right under Billy’s skin. He could feel it in the strong arms wrapped around him in the Camaro, on his living room floor.

Billy was mean, but Steve could match it if he wanted to. He pushed back, but he still ran his fingers over yellowing bruises gently when they’d finished.

Billy never stopped giving him shit on the basketball court. They were worse than ever, pushing and shoving and stealing and fouling. Coach had yelled at them to figure their shit out more than once. Once even when they were at an away game, in front of another team, another school.

They’d fucked in the locker room and come back with even more fire. 

Steve had things of Billy’s around, forgotten or purposefully left to claim Steve as his own. There was a pair of basketball shorts in his room, stiff with sweat and B.H. written messily on the tag. There was a crowbar in his backseat from when Billy had found him, pulled over on a country road with tears behind his eyes and a tire half off his car.

The elder Harrington had never taught Steve how to change a tire. He’d never taught Steve anything. But they had AAA. Steve could get a tow. But there weren’t any houses in sight and he was so angry at the world and he _couldn’t_ go into those woods in the middle of the night alone. So he’d accepted his fate, death in a Beemer because he was too stupid to change a tire. But Billy had shown up, roaring down the road in a too-loud car that matched his too-loud personality. He didn’t say a word as he changed the tire with ease. Bit out a scathing remark when he’d finished, something about Steve being a _damn idiot._ Kissed him in another sunset, against a frozen car. 

They weren’t in a relationship. Billy wasn’t his new Nancy. But he was fun. He gave Steve the ability to take a breath in a world determined to suffocate him. 

There was a necklace in his car, golden and small and worn on the back where Billy rubbed the finish off with his right thumb over the years. It sat snagged on the stick shift, where it had caught when Billy had leaned over it the last time he’d been in the car. Had slipped it from his head impatiently when a simple tug wouldn’t unstick him. Had looked up at Steve with daring blue eyes and wicked lips, sharp teeth and burning flame. 

There was a necklace in his car, and Steve couldn’t unwind it from where it had landed. 

There was a necklace in his car, stuck next to a tattered flyer that read _William Hargrove; 17; Last seen in brown leather jacket, blue jeans; Defining features: one ear pierced and a gold St. Mary pendant; Missing 02/15/1985._

_There was a necklace in his car._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well ok so I guess I couldn't leave it there.

Steve had a baseball bat in his hand. It was unnaturally unbalanced, stabbed through with so many nails he was pretty sure another would splinter it to nothing. But it was special. He’d made it exactly for this purpose. It swung with practiced ease, fresh and lacking any black blood. 

Steve hadn’t seen Billy for five days. It wouldn’t have been strange, had the rest of the school been whispering nonsensical rumors at the same time. No one had seen the young Hargrove in four days. He’d disappeared, like a ghost in the night. As quickly as he’d shown up in Hawkins, he’d departed. He’d taken something of Steve with him, as he went, ripped it from Steve’s cracked open ribs and bit down with too-sharp teeth and blood on his tongue. 

Hopper had found Billy’s car two nights after Neil Hargrove had wandered into the police station, muttering something about his _damn son, running off again._ The police chief hadn’t asked what he meant by _again._

The Camaro, still dented and rough from the fall, had been in shambles of its former glory. The spare tire had been on the back driver’s side, small and offsetting the rest of the vehicle. There were patches Steve knew too well, half painted over and covered in body filler from where Billy was repairing the damage Max had caused. His jack was still in the backseat, and Steve couldn’t remember if it had been there the last time he was. If that spare tire had been meant to be interpreted, if the universe had done it to show him a clue or if Billy had, but Steve couldn’t figure it out even if he’d known.

There hadn’t been a sign of Billy in that car. The keys had been taken, brought and hidden with their owner. An empty pack of smokes sat abandoned on the passenger side seat.

A dark winter night was on the forefront of his mind, when he’d found the car right where Hop had told him. A night where he’d chainsmoked cigarettes in that seat, window down as Billy complained about the cold. Where they’d bitched about life and each other and bonded over thrown fists and sex and lives that weren’t their own. They never talked about anything deep, nothing past scratching the surface of their demons. But in a way, Steve doubted anyone else in Hawkins _got_ him the way Billy Hargrove did. 

Hopper had called him the night he found the car and said, “Hey, kid, you’re friendly with that Hargrove kid, right?” and Steve could’ve laughed right there, but he hadn’t. He’d gone to look at that car instead, to tell Hopper if anything was out of place because Neil couldn’t be bothered and Hopper had no clue if Billy Hargrove had any friends. Besides Steve, if you could call the two of them friends. 

That car meant _trouble_ just as much as its owner. 

“Dustin,” Steve called, outside the Henderson house, bat in one hand and crowbar in the other. The crowbar left by Billy. Steve wondered if when he brought it to his lips in the cold air he’d be able to taste the frozen metal of Billy’s mouth, his sweat dried long ago. If when he tasted it, it would feel like ripping his tongue from a frozen street sign pole, the same way kissing Billy had. It didn’t. It tasted like betrayal, like death, like the sickly sweet dread constantly in the back of his throat. Like nothing at all, except the black paint that coated it at the same time. 

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see you lick that thing, dude, before I take it,” 

Steve tossed the crowbar to Dustin regardless. 

“Are they back?” The panic was clear in his wide eyes, baseball cap pulled low over messy curls. 

“Worse,” Steve said, “Radio Max. Tell her to steer clear of the house.” 

“This is about that asshole? Dude, he like, nearly killed you.”

“You still in or not, dickhead?”

Dustin had followed him to the car, like he knew he would. The kid was like a puppy, complete with the same penchant for mischief. “Yeah, but you still haven’t told me what ‘it’ is.”

They had pulled up to the Hargrove residence with a song Billy would’ve listened to but Steve can’t find it in himself to like blaring from the Beemer’s stereo. Snow drifted lazily around them, turning sloppy as the weather warmed but persisting nonetheless. Steve could taste the sickly damp air of the tunnels on his tongue as clearly as he could still taste the blood and alcohol on Billy’s lips.

“Same rules as before. Stay behind me. When I say run, you _run._ ”

“Steve, my man, this is _not_ worse than demodogs.”

The world had shifted, lost under Hawkins in living tunnels. Dustin squirrelled away behind him, weapons in the air, monsters on the cuff of existence. The snow flakes morphed into deadly dust, clouding Steve’s vision. Winter air turned damp, filled with death. Steve needed a lighter, a bandana, anything. The sky was dark despite the kiss of sun Steve had felt on his forearms.

As quickly as it had come, the Upside Down disappeared, abandoning Steve to a world nearly as evil, but much more real. One that he couldn’t escape, no matter how much he tried. 

Steve was the monster in the woods. The sacrificial lamb had found his condemner, wrapped in a skin that no longer looked human. He was not a victim, he was the prosecutor. He would take no shit, give no mercy. 

A white garage door. Steve had a can of red spray paint, left over from the stupid shit with Nancy that seemed like forever ago. He had a can of red spray paint that begged to be used. 

_Where is Billy Hargrove?_

In sloppy red paint, child-like handwriting and all. It got the point across. It insinuated what Steve already knew. Blood in white snow. It mocked him. The world mocked him, daring to snow, daring to turn, daring to exist, when it should be ending because a Hawkins kid went missing for the third time in under two years. 

The worst part was, Steve thought, how had he not fucked Billy Hargrove, witnessed him smoke a joint under the stars, or felt his hands in his hair, pulling and caressing, he wouldn’t have cared, either. Would’ve brushed it off in the same way he did Barb. 

He liked to think he’d grown in the year since Barb died. Liked to think that monsters in the woods and dying kids and a pretty girl who he thought loved him and a group of kids with one who looked at him like he held the world in his hands had maybe made him better, as a person. 

Steve Harrington could shotgun a beer like no one else. That would never change. He’d been at a party, back when he and Billy were still fighting instead of fucking, impaled beer in hand, when he’d realized that he was different. That the world around him had shifted and abandoned him somewhere he didn’t recognize without Nancy or even the kids. In a world that he had mostly left for her, and trying to get back to that point, that pre-Nancy Steve, wasn’t going to happen.

He had realized it with a beer in his hand and his eyes on _trouble._

Steve Harrington wasn’t going to let anyone else die if he could have a say in it. He wasn’t going to be passive anymore. He had kids that looked up to him. And he wasn’t going to be _responsible_ or _nice_ or anything, but he was going to do what he wanted and be who he wanted and have who he wanted and no one was going to fucking _die anymore._

“Dustin,” Steve ordered as he turned, picking up his bat again and approaching Neil’s pickup with vengeance in his steps. With a hard swing, the air left one of the front tires, “Get the windows.”

“What the _fuck_ are you doing, Steve?” Dustin’s voice was high, shrill and nervous. He did what he was told, anyways. With a hesitant hand, he hit the passenger side window out in a shower of glass. It fell with the sound of windchimes, and Steve revelled in it. “This is so illegal, dude,” Dustin continued as he moved to the next one.

The tires were easy, deflating like sad balloons with just one hit from the bat. The windshield was harder, shatter resistant and tough against Steve’s will. It split once, twice, three times, caving in as Steve went. 

Steve was alive with the high of destruction, chest heaving with each hit. His fingers were white on the bat, from the cold and from a death-like grip. It was almost like the high he felt when black masses exploded in front of him, when inky blood poured from monsters, when he was actually able to _do_ something good. All he wanted was to destroy something of Neil’s, to give him a taste of his own medicine. To destroy something, to send a message. _You won’t get away with it._

The front door slammed open. 

Billy Hargrove was trouble. He was _troubled._ The kind of guy moms warned their teenage daughters about, told them to steer clear of because he wouldn’t do anything good, wouldn’t treat them right. Steve Harrington never had a mother who warned him about things, and if he had, she sure as hell wouldn’t have warned him about Billy. 

He had been the guy to be warned about, back before Nancy. When he still cared about being _King_ and having a group of people around to worship him. Steve had been the one with the bad reputation with girls, bouncing back and forth until he got stuck on Nancy and her curls and her sharp tongue and her ability to shoot a gun. Until he’d found out what love was, then had it ripped away.

He had a birthmark on his shoulder. The first time Steve noticed it, Billy had been shirtless next to him in a Beemer with fogged up windows and a smoke filled cab. The winter had raged around them, hurling thick snowflakes at the car with the vengeance of an ex-lover. With the vengeance contained in the boy next to him. Steve hadn’t touched it, not like he wanted to, just admired from a distance they’d nonverbally decided was required at one point or another. Or maybe, Steve had just decided that distance was required, and made Billy a passive party to it.

Neil had one that nearly matched, poking out from his shirt collar. 

Steve wondered what it would be like to feel his bat connect with it.

Neil’s eyes were blue, too. The rage that filled them at the sight of Steve’s bat connecting with his pickup was something Steve had never seen in Billy’s. Something drastically different, even from that night at the Byers’. It was pointed, where Billy’s only had a target that wasn’t himself. It had Steve in its sights, and it wasn’t going to let up. Steve wondered if he carried a gun as Neil opened his mouth to unleash some of that rage. 

Maxine Mayfield, a spitfire with nearly as much trouble on her horizon as her step brother, flew from the house like a shot. Her coat was zipped, a hat covering wild red locks, she had been _prepared._

“Steve,” she had screamed, unsticking him from where his shoes had melded with the wet driveway. He swung his bat in a loose, one-handed circle. Prepared. He’d faced worse monsters than Neil, and he’d _won._

“ _Steve,_ ” the voice behind him screamed again, “Stop. _Run._ ”

He did. After a second’s hesitation, he bolted, because no one could ever say Steve Harrington didn’t know when flight was the right response. He was used to running, to fleeing a scene full of monsters that he’d gotten himself into, that was no exception. The car was still on, Steve’s keys left in the ignition for this purpose.

As they fled, Steve could swear he saw Neil Hargrove’s face unfurl like an inky black flower in the rear view mirror. 

_Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck._

Steve repeated the mantra under his breath as he drove faster than he should’ve with two kids in his car and snow around them.

“Dustin,” Max said when they were a mile from the Hargrove house, breathing heavy and hands shaking. “I need to talk to Steve. Alone.” 

“Seriously?” Dustin had asked, “Uh, I just witnessed _that_ whole thing. And we are in a car. There’s no fucking privacy in here.”

Steve had stepped on the brake much harder than he’d meant to. Max slammed into the back of his seat, unbuckled and unprepared. Dustin was caught roughly by his seatbelt. “Out.”

“ _What?_ ” Dustin had asked, “Seriously? Dude, it’s freezing out there.”

“ _Out, Dustin._ Take a walk.”

The air wasn’t bitterly cold as the world moved through February, sun peaking through the clouds just enough to melt the gentle snow as it landed on the pavement. There weren’t monsters in those woods anymore. Dustin was old enough to chill outside for a minute, he had a coat and everything.

“ _Steve,_ you don’t get it. Billy just ran away,” she’d said, once Dustin had roughly shut the door behind him. 

Steve wondered how _he’d_ been the only sane one left in the world. “He left his car, Max. You know he didn’t just run away.”

“I don’t know what you think, but Neil didn’t do anything to him. He only hit him the _once_ and Billy fucking deserved it. He should’ve hit him _more._ ”

And Steve hadn’t ever understood it before, how you could get so mad at a kid to want to hurt them, but he did in that moment, for a second. Just for a second, his anger blinded him. But he was a _good guy_ and he took a deep breath and waited to be calm. He was _nice,_ he didn’t do crazy shit like Billy had. Except for, well, Neil Hargrove’s car. But that was _different._

“That’s bullshit. Once? Bullshit. You know it’s bullshit, Max. You _lived_ with him.”

“He didn’t-” Maxine paused, taking in deep breaths of her own, “He’s not. _Don’t_ talk about him like that.”

“No one deserves it, Max. Not even him.”

She had shifted uncomfortably, arms crossing and uncrossing as she refused to meet Steve’s eyes. “You could’ve done something,” she’d said, like she still doubted him. She seemed her age in that moment, small and afraid and in such deep denial. The kids he’d gotten stuck with almost never seemed their ages, always smarter and quicker than him, with fearless abandon even when they shoud’ve been very, very afraid. 

“So could you.” Steve had thumbed the pendant that hung around the gear shift. Rubbed his thumb where the varnish had worn away, like he assumed Billy had done. Not that he’d actually seen it. But he could imagine the other boy doing it in the face of a cruel world, a comfort. He could imagine.

With that, Dustin was clambering back into the car, “You looked done. It’s cold, dude, don’t look at me like that.”

 

Nancy’s hand stung the side of his face, the heat that rose after the slap heightened by cold winter air. 

“What the _fuck,_ Nance?”

“You didn’t even like him, Steve, and you took a bat to his dad’s car. Why? Barb was my _best friend_ and you told me it was nothing when she went missing. She’s _dead_ and you didn’t care. But Hargrove goes missing for a second and the world fucking ends.” Her curls were short and wild, blown around in the wind. She had a scarf wrapped around her neck that she hadn’t been wearing that day in school. _Jonathan’s._

He wasn’t with her anymore, it didn’t matter.

“It’s different. I know what happened to him. He didn’t run away.”

“And Barb did? Do you think this is any different? She’ll turn up, you said. Why do you even care, anyway? He beat you up.”

“You don’t get to give a shit about what I care about. I’m _bullshit,_ remember?” He could feel that fire, the one that Billy had a knack for inducing, even if he wasn’t there, rise in his throat. They hadn’t talked in nearly three months, not really. Ships in the night, passing and Steve ignoring both her and Jonathan where he could. Opposing forces over the occasional dinner table, silent as they spoke with the kids and Joyce, but rarely with each other.

“Fuck you, Steve. Fuck you. You’re such a damn hypocrite. And you’re on your way to being just as bad as him, if you keep this up.” Those blue eyes were near tears, but that part of Steve that should’ve wanted to wipe them away, to comfort her, had been replaced with the part that held a fervent need to find Billy. A part that Billy had fueled, with cruel words and insinuations, one that made him realize that he deserved better than Nancy Fucking Wheeler, who ripped his heart out with pointed nails in a bathroom at a party, who didn’t give a shit about him, in the end. 

He didn’t hate her. He couldn’t. But he didn’t think that things were ever actually that great with her, anymore. Thanks to a boy that was _worse_ but never lied, was predictable. Maybe even _liked him_ for who he was, without _King Steve_ and because of him at the same time. Who was as messed up as him, probably even _worse_ there, too.

She was telling the truth. But Steve liked to think that if Barb went missing that day, he would’ve cared a lot more than he had before. He still liked to think he’d grown.

“So what, Nance? None of this shit fucking _matters._ Don’t you get it? The world went to shit and he’s fucking _dead_ and no one gives a shit but me.” He wondered when it had turned to him to caring, to noticing things, when it had always been everyone else before. 

“You don’t know that, Steve. He just ran away.” 

“Like Barb did?” It was uncalled for, unnecessarily mean, but Steve hadn’t ever been that great at knowing what was too far. 

Nancy had bristled even more than before. Every edge she’d had sharpening and preparing to gut Steve once again, like she had countless times before. There was a place in Steve’s heart reserved for her, he knew it would always be there, _Nancy Wheeler_ carved in blood red muscle. He knew he still probably loved her, in some capacity that she was doing her best to destroy with fucking Byers and this shit. But in that moment, all he could feel for her was hate, disgust, everything ugly and wrong in his being forced at her. 

“Whatever. Leave the kids _out of it,_ you idiot. Dustin doesn’t need a record. He’s _fourteen,_ ” she’d spat at him, wide eyes narrow and calculating. One the verge of discovering what Steve had never been good at hiding. _Idiot_ didn’t hold that same connotation as it had when she called him it in her bed so many months ago. It only held ice, now, no warmth or hidden smiles.

“Thirteen,” Steve had corrected, “His birthday’s not ‘till March.”

And she had rolled those eyes when she stormed back to the Byers’ house. Back to Jonathan. Back to a life that he didn’t fucking _get,_ didn’t _deserve,_ because Billy was gone and Steve’s last words to him had been _I’m not a fucking fag._

The last words Billy had heard from him had been a goddamn lie. 

Steve didn’t know what he was. He just knew that kissing Billy, fucking Billy, smoking with Billy in air that burned his skin, was coming up for air in a world trying it’s hardest to eat him alive. He didn’t know if that made him gay, but the second Billy disappeared he hadn’t cared what it made him anymore.

Steve could swear Billy wasn’t from Earth. He was sure of it the first time he’d kissed him on the mouth. 

He was something _else,_ walking among humans. Whether he was the devil or a fallen angel Steve couldn’t figure out, though he thought maybe there wasn’t really a difference.

Steve wasn’t ever a religious person. Even when his parents were around all the time, they’d never given enough of a shit to force him into a church every Sunday. They’d gone on Christmas yearly, Easter sometimes. 

His mother’s mother had been Jewish, supposedly, and he knew that that _technically_ made him Jewish, too, but he’d never so much as seen the inside of a temple. Or lit a menorah or spun a dreidel or whatever the fuck Jewish kids were supposed to do. He’d never even met this woman, this supposed relative who lived back in Long Island where his mother was from and died long before Steve had even been born. His mom never talked about her life before Hawkins, only to tell Steve she would be visiting for another week or two the night before she did.

His dad had been from Hawkins, met his mother in college on a New York City bus when she had been fighting with the driver about her fare or it’s lateness or his attitude or something that Steve had never cared enough to remember from his father’s retellings. He’d been intrigued, brought her back to Hawkins and married her with the ease of a rich boy with Daddy’s money. Steve had never seen this side of his mother, the one who supposedly had some fire in her, and truthfully, he didn’t believe it existed. She’d never been religious, either, attending some church her father had brought her to and then the one Steve’s father had. 

But nonetheless, Steve knew Billy was ethereal as much as he knew he was trouble. 

Billy Hargrove looked like he crawled up from the pits of hell, a scowl so deep Steve had wanted to say _watch out, your face’ll get stuck like that,_ like his mom always had to him. He didn’t. He didn’t because Billy had a splotchy bruise that ran just as deep as that scowl. 

It had been two weeks before the necklace got caught on Steve’s gear shift. Two weeks and five days before _it_ happened. Billy Hargrove had bruise across his chest and Steve only noticed because he refused to be skins and had his shirt only unbuttoned three buttons down instead of nearly completely open.

He hadn’t known why it had been that time. Why Billy hadn’t been skins at practice because of a bruise even though he was _always_ skins, even after the night at the Byers’ when he’d had bruises from Steve and those pesky ones Steve knew he didn’t cause. Billy had still been skins. Worn those bruises like a badge of honor. Laughed with their teammates in the same way. Billy was _always_ skins. But it was that time that made his blood boil more than usual.

He knew _something._ Could feel it before it happened, before Billy Hargrove disappeared. Because as Steve figured that boy out, he learned that even the wildest things he did had a purpose. Had something behind them. Usually a man named Neil that was slowly creeping into Steve’s nightmares to join demodogs and death soaked air. Steve still hadn’t ever seen the man, then, but he crept in with slimy hands and that look in Billy’s eyes when he was destroying something. 

Billy had been meaner than usual that practice, knocking Steve down at every chance and taunting like there was no tomorrow. It was foreplay in an open room, but it was harsh pain that Steve knew he wasn’t privy to at the same time. 

Billy Hargrove had said seven Hail Marys in the locker room after everyone had left, knees on damp concrete and believing himself to be alone. He hadn’t been. Steve had been around the corner, unintentionally spying. He’d stayed back, because Billy was always best after practice, and Steve wanted to get laid more often than he could think about the world ending and his life being meaningless. He wanted to get laid so he _couldn’t_ think about those things. And Billy Hargrove never said no. Ever. 

_They weren’t boyfriends._ Steve didn’t even _like_ Billy.

But Billy Hargrove said seven Hail Marys with a bruise so deep Steve knew it meant broken ribs. He’d had first hand experience with bruises like that, courtesy of the boy with them then. 

He said seven Hail Marys with a burn across his back. Rough scrapes that ran parallel down his shoulder blades, red hot and angrier than the boy they were living on. They stopped just above where his rib cage and the rippling muscles that accompanied it showed its weakness out from under harder bones. From his hideout around a bay of lockers, Steve hadn’t been able to tell what caused them, whether carpet or pavement, but he knew who had. 

Neil was getting _worse._

Steve could feel it in the air, like the burning static left after a lightning bolt hits the tree a few feet away instead of you. He’d known hatred in that moment, pure like he’d held for the Hawkins lab, when he’d witnessed two lonesome tears slip from those fiery blue eyes as Billy stretched to rub cream across a back he couldn’t quite reach. 

As he fled from that hideout in the locker room, Steve was glad he had skipped lunch, because he wouldn’t have been able to keep it down otherwise.

Steve had been convinced Billy Hargrove was a fallen angel with his head hitting his bed’s backboard. A hand on his chest, holding him down as Billy bounced roughly on Steve’s dick. So, maybe he had been thinking with the wrong head when he’d thought it, but it didn’t make it any less true.

Billy’s curls had bounced opposite of his tan body, lifting gently and Steve could swear the light from his window formed them into a golden halo. He’d been stronger than Steve thought possible, hand firm enough to nearly hurt. 

Steve had never been religious, but he could recognize a blond haired, blue eyed angel that walked out from some church painting when he saw one. 

Billy never stayed, after, because once Steve had forgotten who he was, what they were, and kissed Billy’s bruised knuckles. Like he would’ve had it been anyone but Billy who came to him after being hurt or hurting himself or someone else. But Billy had snatched his hand away like he’d been burned, hissed “ _Don’t do that shit, Harrington, I’m not your bitch,_ ” and practically fled from the bed they’d shared just seconds before. 

So no, Billy didn’t stay, even when Steve stopped hating him so much and thinking maybe, just maybe, he wanted him to.

Steve had meant to escape the Byers’ after dropping Dustin off for DnD. But Nancy caught him off guard. Stalled him. And the chief's pickup pulled up too fast. The universe had it out for him, he was sure of it. 

The mantra returned. _Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck._

Hopper was nearly murderous when he stepped out of that pickup, El scrambling out fast and shooting past where Steve was plastered to his Beemer with barely a greeting. 

So, maybe Steve Harrington wasn’t exactly used to his actions having consequences. 

He had his sunglasses covering his eyes, blocking out the harsh white of fresh snow and masking his guilt. It would’ve been so easy to flee, to hop into his car and blow past a fuming Hopper. His fingers twitched and itched for a cigarette that he couldn’t smoke in front of the chief. 

Thoughts of Billy were all consuming in the days after he went missing. All Steve could think about, even on the brink of what could be his own legal doom, was how that cigarette that hung from Hopper’s downturned lips reminded of the ones that always hung from Billy’s. Whether in a scowl or a smirk or with a tongue peaking out and lapping at them suggestively. Annoyingly. Reminded Steve of how he could steal a joint from Billy’s pink lips with minor griping if he blew the smoke back between them. 

He wondered if even if he got closure, found out what really happened to Billy, if he could ever go back to before the boy ran through his mind. Or if he’d been forever changed once again. If he’d just been damaged in one more way.

How nice it would be to just be _King Steve_ with absent parents and parties and easy girls flocking him in the halls. Without monsters in the woods or acrid air in his mouth or a broken heart or Nancy Wheeler or Billy Hargrove. Life had been _easy_ then. And it was so far out of reach, Steve couldn’t believe he’d tried for it again, back when he and Billy were still throwing fists. It was a life that passed him by, abandoned him to dissatisfaction and pain, but expecting him to run to follow it nonetheless.

Steve Harrington had led a planned life, and he was barely in the beginning stages of fucking that up.

Hopper sucked on that cigarette like it was the only thing keeping him sane. For all Steve knew, it was. “You gonna tell me what you know about some kid with baseball bat causing property damage at the Hargrove’s?”

Steve just said, “Nope.” He’d had enough experience with doing things he wasn’t supposed to in a small town to know that denial was always the best method with the police. Denial and a smile that won over everyone, mothers and cops and pretty school girls included.

Hopper sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose like _he_ was exhausted by the world. “You’re lucky he didn’t know your name, kid. As long as Max doesn’t give the two of you up, he can’t press charges,” he said with another long suck of his cigarette.

Steve doubted that. Wondered how much of a hand the chief had in getting everyone’s favorite babysitter off the hook for losing his mind temporarily. “How much did you know?” He asked, hoping Hopper would understand without him actually having to say it. They danced around that topic, everyone did. It was Hawkins, Indiana, and you don’t just talk about shit like that. There were always rumors, sure, but no one ever talked about the kids whose parents went too hard, too far. You don’t ask the chief of police, _did you know he was beating him? Did you know, and let it happen?_

“Enough to not arrest you, even if he had known your name. But kid, you can’t take the law into your own hands. If he did something, I’ll get him on it.”

Steve snorted at that, arms crossed, “No, you won’t.” Because he may have been some suburban rich boy, but he was learning that the world wasn’t nearly as fair as he previously thought. There were labs that kidnapped kids and monsters that killed good people and in his experience, the bad guys won more often than not. Neil Hargrove had gotten away with it for years, covered his tracks, and Steve doubted a shitty small town cop was going to change that. Even if in the end, he liked Hopper, the guy wasn’t known for being a great cop.

Hopper nearly had steam coming out his ears when Steve slid into his Beemer with a slam of the door and took off.


	3. Chapter 3

“I gave you this?” Billy had asked, the statement upturned because he already knew the answer but wanted to confirmation anyway. His hand had been in Steve’s hair, blunt finger pressing into the small silver scar in his hairline. It ached under the pressure, a harsh reminder of the night at the Byers’ and how dangerous the body of muscle pushed flush against him could be. The ghost of a broken plate and unbridled rage.

“Yeah,” Steve had breathed. His words just barely there, because anything too much would scare off this deer of a boy on the couch next to him. 

They had had just short of an entire mickey of rum split between their stomachs, a bowl and a half settled in their lungs. Steve’s face had been hot, warmed from weed smoke and alcohol and the glow of an orgasm. It had been the second time Billy had shown up invited, one of only three nights they got to spend in the ease of an empty house together. 

He didn’t dare do anything risky, anything mean or joking, the threat of a night spent with someone he still didn’t like was too enticing.

Billy had seemed almost pleased with himself, when he pressed his finger into that scar. Almost disgusted, at the same time. His lips had been turned up, salacious tongue poked out, but his eyes were cloudy. The grey sky before a raging storm. 

His hand had slipped down, fingers gracing across Steve’s throat with a gentle finesse Steve hadn’t ever expected from someone like Billy. Someone so blunt and calloused and unforgivingly _mean._ But everytime he collided with Billy, he was surprised by what he found. There was the expected, the mean, the harsh, the biting. But there was the hurt child, hidden down so deep anyone else could’ve overlooked it. Everyone else had. That Steve wasn’t allowed to see, but caught glimpses of when he wasn’t expecting it.

The fingers had stopped at the nape of his neck, thumb on Steve’s Adam’s apple with enough pressure to remind him what those hands were capable of. Billy brushed the thin scar that twisted just below his hairline and ventured just below where the line of a tee shirt would be had Steve been wearing one.

“This one?” He’d asked, tracing the indent. 

“Tommy tried to push me in the pool when I was ten, I hit the diving board.” 

Billy had chuckled at that, “Tommy’s a fuckin’ idiot,” he’d said, fingers ghosting down until they reached the sharp line that zig-zagged down Steve’s inner bicep. He didn’t have to ask.

“Caught it on the top of a fence I was climbing over.”

“Klutz,” Billy’s breath had been hot and smokey on Steve’s neck, those lips turned up evilly. He moved to the barely visible white speckling just above Steve’s left pec. Pressed down when Steve hadn’t flinched.

“Fell on the pool deck and didn’t get my arms out in time. I was a stupid kid.”

“Still are, pretty boy,” Billy had teased, voice lacking the sharpness it would’ve held had they not just fucked.

Steve hadn’t ever gotten another moment like that one. 

He hadn’t known he’d wanted another one, needed one, until the option wasn’t there anymore. 

He wondered what mourning was. If it was this, this burning rage that boiled under his skin and up the back of his throat. He’d never really mourned before. His grandparents were all dead, but he’d never really known them anyway. Barb was dead, but he’d been too self focused to ever really even notice in a way other than how it was affecting Nancy. 

He had a picture of Billy. A polaroid, a little crinkled on the corners from where Billy had ripped it from Steve’s hands to destroy it before it saw the light of day. 

But he’d been shockingly pretty in that picture. _A model,_ Steve had thought as the washed out pigment crept lazily onto the printed polaroid. _In another life, he’d be with someone else, somewhere else._

Steve had always had a false confidence, projected loud and _kingly._ There had been times where it had been mostly truth, like when he and Tommy and Carol had run the school, when he’d been in his element with the girls of Hawkins, sly and handsome and falsely innocent. He’d known every trick necessary to get into their pants and not let them hate him when he didn’t call after. But Nancy had knocked him down in that respect, too. Dropped his real confidence down past his bravado, reminded him that he wasn’t truly worthy of her, of those he was with.

That Billy Hargrove was trouble, beautiful trouble.

Steve was just some small town boy. The boy next door. 

He couldn’t even call Billy _his,_ for real, he hadn’t known he’d wanted that chance. 

Steve removed that polaroid from its hiding place in his bedside table drawer to a pocket in his billfold the night Hopper found Billy’s car. 

The washed out colors had made Billy’s golden skin paler but his curls blonder. He was surrounded in a cloud of his own cigarette smoke, offending article still stuck between sharp teeth. His heavy lidded eyes still reddened from the bowl they’d smoked previously, the grey-blue of an ocean Steve had only seen in a New York winter. Billy had been shirtless in Steve’s Beemer, set too cold for it to happen but Billy ignoring the chill in favor of showing off. 

He looked nearly _happy._ Pointed lips had turned up, _knowing_ that he looked like sex incarnate, like a fallen Icarus burned by his own hubris, like everything that Hawkins, Indiana wasn’t. He was looking past the camera, through thick lashes, at Steve. Daring him.

Steve kept the picture hidden between bills, away from any possible prying eyes. 

It was _his._ It was a piece of what they’d had that belonged only to him. That no one else could notice, could take away from him. That he couldn’t ruin for himself.

Billy was _different,_ when it was just the two of them. When there was no crowd, less need to posture, the need to be domineering lessened and turned into something that came out usually only when dicks were also out. When there was no one to witness his projected sense of self, no one he needed to hide from, no one who would hurt him. He was still biting and mean and full of fire, but he _laughed._ He smiled, too, something real and not for the manipulation of anyone else, no hidden meanings or insinuations. But every once in a while, Billy Hargrove _smiled._ And it made something in Steve’s chest ache.

He didn’t _like_ Billy. 

“Next time you gotta warn me before you go all demodog-fight-scene on something and almost get arrested and-or killed, dude,” Dustin said as he climbed into the Beemer for his daily ride to school, “You’re lucky Hop likes you now, you know. He didn’t tell my mom. She would’ve like, smothered you with her knitting, or something. She’s a scary lady. I swear.”

Steve had laughed, something genuine for what seemed like the first time in much too long, “Dustin, your mother is as scary as Mews Two.”

“Mews Two bit me, three days ago, so your point is invalid, dude.”

The kid had looked on the brink of saying something else, something real, something that wasn’t a joke about his cat or his sweet mother. Steve turned up the music instead. 

The high school was buzzing with viscous rumors, dripping sickly sweet on cruel teenage tongues, of what he’d done, why he’d done it, who he’d done it for. He heard it in the hum of the halls, how they fell silent when he walked through them, how eyes widened in his presence. How they got louder when he’d passed just out of earshot, deafening him in a quiet rumble. 

_He cared too much,_ they’d said, with those unintelligible whispers. _Who gives that much of a shit about someone who’d nearly broken his nose?_

Billy hadn’t hung around him in the halls, before he’d gone missing. They’d been regulated to taunting basketball courts and too-cold cars and rarely, the Harrington estate. Steve had done his best to avoid Billy in those halls, barely a week prior. 

One thing Steve had forgotten, in the months since he’d last been on Tommy’s good side, is how much the guy actually _cared._ He’d forgotten how fast and hard the guy started caring, really caring, for those around him. Hidden deep beneath a harsh exterior with an obnoxious need to please, the guy was a pretty good friend. After all, Steve had hung with him since they’d both been in elementary school.

Figures, then, he’d care about what happened to his new _King._

But Steve still hadn’t expected the annoying clap on his shoulder as he stood at his locker, segregated from the rest of the school like a leper. The rest of the swarming hive mind kept their distance. _He’d lost it._

Tommy said, low in Steve’s ear with a tone that read like he still couldn’t stand the sight of Steve Harrington despite the time that had past, “You think he’s dead, don’t you?”

It was the first time anyone had dared say it aloud to Steve. Dared speak it into existence. The town had gone through _enough_ they didn’t need another death.

No one dared say it to Steve, for fear of a boy who’d lost himself in a bat. 

“You have to tell me what you know,” Tommy insisted, as Steve was trying his hardest not to dig dull fingernails through the skin of his palms, “ _I_ am his friend. What the fuck did his Dad do?”

Steve slammed his locker door shut, hard enough to surprise himself with the noise. He needed another cigarette. He needed Tommy to shut up and get his hand off his shoulder. He needed someone to find Billy, so everything would go back to what it was. He needed things to be _normal_ again.

But he thought that maybe things really hadn’t been normal since that night Barb went missing. He thought, _maybe it would be worth it, to never have met him, if it meant the world would start spinning again._

He shrugged away from Tommy. “It’s not my place to say, man,” he said as he went, desperate for some sort of escape from this bizarre hell he’d been thrown into. 

“Seriously? You weren’t even friends. What the fuck did he tell _you_?” Tommy was close to shouting then, but Steve couldn’t find it in himself to care. He couldn’t care that there were pairs of eyes on him as he walked away, slow and deliberately ignoring the other teen. 

Steve knew, logically, that other people were hurt by Billy’s disappearance, but he couldn’t stand the idea that _Tommy_ thought he was reeling in anyway even close to how Steve was. That he thought he was _closer_ to Billy than Steve had been.

It was selfish, but Steve hadn’t exactly been raised to be any other way. He tried to put others before himself, now, but old habits died hard. 

Billy Hargrove had been _his._

In all their anger and fighting and damage, in all their hatred for the other, in that part of Steve that thought maybe he could like him, love him, be with him for real some time in another life, Billy had been _Steve’s._ No one else’s, despite the front he’d put on for the rest of the world. They hadn’t ever decided on it. Steve couldn't ever say it. But it was true in Steve’s mind nonetheless, despite the effort it took to delude himself.

Billy Hargrove wasn’t ever his _boyfriend._

 

Steve Harrington had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. 

He’d been pissed. So angry his vision blurred red in the corners. The world had twisted upside-down, for no reason other than that Steve never seemed to be in control anymore, not even of himself half the time.

He hadn’t even been _aimed_ at Billy, when he’d fired.

_Collateral damage._

They’d fought. A lot. Over anything and everything, though it had stopped ending in fistfights and more in fucking.

So when Billy had pushed him too far, one miserable day after a school full of pointless classes Steve couldn’t seem to focus on enough to pass, he’d fired a shot that he hadn’t known was in his barrel. Hell, he hadn’t even known he could fire _anything_ that would actually cause damage to the other boy. Shooting blank words and ceaseless taunts only ever stoked the fire that was Billy Hargrove.

He’d been pissed because he’d picked Dustin up from the middle school that day. In of itself, not unusual, nothing but a minor annoyance that he couldn’t even admit to himself that he looked forward to more and more as the months since the end of the world passed. 

But he’d been a little late. He’d been smoking cigarettes in the back of the high school, because he hadn’t slept the night before and he couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking without the sweet relief of nicotine. Or a boy with trouble in his heart and biting teeth. But they’d been at school, they hadn’t had basketball practice, he’d only seen those curls from a distance. There’d been no secret fight nor biting words to push adrenaline through his veins and calm the sense of mounting doom that had made a home in Steve’s shaking hands. So he’d been smoking. He had a reputation to uphold, especially to some kid who thought he was the coolest shit ever, so he smoked until his hands were still enough.

So he’d been a little late. Late enough for all the other dickheads to have been picked up. Late enough to witness some skinny kid rip Dustin’s backpack from his shoulders and to swing it at Dustin’s head when the latter reached to snatch it back. 

Early enough for the kid to drop it when he’d heard the rumble of the Beemer. For him to dart off, for Dustin’s face to change into the usual smile he held for Steve though it didn’t reach his eyes, for Steve’s dull nails to dig into his steering wheel. 

Dustin had noticed, felt the shift in Steve’s usual demeanor as soon as he reached the car, “Don’t worry about it, Steve, I fought monsters, I can deal with stupid assholes.”

But Steve couldn’t help worrying about it. Couldn’t help but be reminded of how he used to be, what he would’ve done to a weird kid like Dustin beck when he was king. Couldn’t bite down the desire to take his bat to anything that dared attempt to take away Dustin’s annoying but endearing spirit.

Billy had pushed too far without even knowing it, taunting Steve in that way they both knew meant no real harm because he’d placed a cigarette between Steve’s fingers and left his own there for too long. 

“What’s wrong, pretty boy,” he’d said, joining Steve where he was leant on the Beemer’s trunk outside the arcade later that day, “All your preteen friends abandon you?”

When he’d leaned against the Beemer, his knee had brushed Steve’s and stayed there. 

“Fuck off, Hargrove,” Steve had said, rolling his eyes behind Ray-Bans. It was too early in the rapidly approaching night, he was too sober, to pissed at the world, to deal with Billy.

“Jesus, what’s got your panties in a twist, Harrington?” His hand had slipped between them, landing high on Steve’s thigh. “You look like a damn _creep_ out here.”

“Seriously, Hargrove, _fuck off._ I’m not in the damn mood for your bullshit,” It had only been half a lie. He’d just needed to take out his bitterness on someone and Billy was the easiest target, all taunts and annoyances.

“You’ve got something of mine, though, pretty boy, and I’m not leaving ‘till I get it back,” he’d pressed closer, hand rising further up Steve’s thigh inconspicuously. Steve thought of everything Billy had taken from him the second he hadn’t fought back against Steve’s misguided advances, the first time he’d kissed Steve on the mouth hidden in the back of a house party, everytime they connected and Billy showed him he might actually be a real person. 

Billy had kept pushing, pushing, pushing Steve even though the latter could feel bitter heat rising in the back of his throat. It barely took anything, that day. “Ditch the stupid kid, I’ll make it worth your while,” he continued.

Billy hadn’t ever gotten the necklace back. 

The touch had set Steve off, more than the words ever could. Calling Dustin _stupid_ after what Steve had just witnessed had been just a hair too much. He’d let his hatred of the world, his defeat, his sharp fear, boil over to burn Billy.

When he’d shot, he’d aimed to kill. He’d had someone else in his sights, unaware of who but not actually meaning it to be a flighty deer of a boy. Thought he’d given enough warning, but Billy Hargrove was never one to be deterred. 

“Get off, I’m not a _fag_ like you, Hargrove,” he’d spat. Ripped away from the other boy’s fingers. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t stand the thought of ending things with Billy, that his pants grew tight even if he couldn’t stand the other boy in that moment, that he knew what he said in the light wouldn’t ever stop them from coming together in the dark.

Because Billy had never tried to be a _good guy,_ not like Steve had, but he’d offered a cigarette to shaking hands. Because he’d been reminded, with a touch that lingered longer than it should’ve and a tongue that wagged and held vicious secrets, of what happened to those who were different in Hawkins, Indiana. What guys like him did to guys like Jonathan and Billy and Dustin and Will, for being different. Just because Steve had changed, had fallen for a nice girl and a mean boy didn’t mean the rest of their small town had. 

He hadn’t known self destruction until it was too late to fix.

Billy’s eyes had lit like matches, icy blue fire burning from the inside out. His whole being was a fire, hot and wild, filled with unpredictable destruction. Like a fire, Steve had thought, he wasn’t actually unpredictable. He did exactly as expected, like a flame eating dry grass, and turned his heat to burn Steve. He’d been burned, and he fought fire with fire, he would burn back _worse._

Steve still regretted it the moment he’d said it. 

For a second, Steve had thought he was going to get hit. Billy had caught him with a fist in his jacket, drug him forward. “Say it again,” Billy had growled, mere inches away from Steve’s face. Each boy better than anyone else at getting the other riled up, in all ways possible, good or bad.

They had been hidden out in the open. Two boys too close out in a parking lot didn’t turn eyes in the winter. Those few cars that passed by hadn’t giving them a second thought. No one expected anything more than a school yard fight. 

Billy had kissed him, then, hard and rough and so mean Steve didn’t think it could even really be called a kiss. Pushed him back after barely a second of a violent clash, but whispered in his ear, “Fuckin’ pussy and a liar.”

He’d left then, in a haze of cold winter air, with Steve wondering if he’d have preferred a fist. With a dread churning in his stomach, because a wild, injured deer never got far without damaging its flesh more. It was a danger to itself and the rest of the woods. Steve got back into his car to wait for Dustin.

The Camaro tore away with skidding tires and lacking Max, the whole reason Billy had shown up in the first place. The Midwestern wind whistled around him, frigid and blowing loose snow in a self contained tornado. 

Steve thought, _maybe all angels are terrifying,_ as he watched the car skid down icy roads. 

He thought, _maybe the devil is just misunderstood._

Thought, _maybe they are one in the same._

That pendant burned where it touched his skin in his car and he wondered if that made _him_ the demon.

Later, after Billy was gone and the world kept spinning without Steve Harrington, he wondered if those words had been the beginning of Billy’s end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this chapter is hard to follow, I can't tell if I'm clear with when flashbacks/forwards are happening, let me know if it's too confusing. And don't worry, the next chapter is gonna have a lot more of what happened to Billy in it. I'm having too much fun writing a totally messed up Steve.


	4. Chapter 4

He started his search around the spot the Camaro had been abandoned. Wide circles in the woods, prowling and hunting for overturned earth or messed up snow. Like a bloodhound on a mission, he had the scent and he wouldn’t stop hunting until he found _something._ Anything to prove Neil was the monster he knew he was.

Steve was no longer the prey, he was part monster himself, hunting in those woods.

Death smelled like the acrid air of beating tunnels, of crayon covered paper, of cold snow and Billy’s cologne. It was in the cold air, burning his nostrils with a phantom scent. 

He’d told Dustin, that day on the train tracks with slimy meat between his fingers, _It’s like before its going to storm, you know, you can’t see it but you can feel it._

_Electricity._

He had felt that with Billy, that hot electricity that he’d mistaken for the thrill of a fight for longer than he should’ve. But no one’s ever accused Steve Harrington of being _smart._ He could feel it in those woods, too. Burning his skin with little pinpricks that crept up the back of his neck and down his forearms. Skittered across his skin like insects, making him itch and swat.

It didn’t even take him an hour on his prowl for that electricity to cumulate, to spike into a strike of lightning. For Steve to find what he was looking for. It hadn’t been a shallow grave, a frozen body, a bloody disaster as he’d expected.

It was the base of a tree trunk eaten away, harsh purple-black smeared in crisp white snow. It pulsed like an infected wound, slashed into pale flesh. Its woody interior replaced with sick, twisted innards that rose and beat like living intestines. It hissed and gurgled lowly, groaning under the stress of being alive.

The snow he kicked from near that tree turned up rusty brown with old blood, covered from the latest snowfall. He’d seen blood in the snow before, when his father had been determined to teach him to be the perfect son and taken him hunting one deer season. He’d shot a deer, tracked it down, and retched into snow covered bushes until he’d cried and his father had yelled at him. They’d never gone hunting again. 

When he touched the organ in that tree with a hesitant bat, it screamed. Like it was dying. Like it would cave in on itself, and take that world with it. Take Billy with it. 

It screamed, and Steve ran.

Dustin had pressed a walkie talkie in Steve’s hands shortly after the end of the world was over. Said, _for emergencies,_ because he’d known Steve wasn’t going to use it to chat with the rest of the party. He’d stored it in the Beemer’s trunk, next to a spare set of batteries and a baseball bat stabbed through with nails. He’d taken it out one night, when the world was eating him whole, turned it on just to listen to the cackle of kids who loved each other in a house that was too empty even with all the lights on. Replaced it in the morning, swore that that secret would follow him to his grave, even though at the time he’d thought it would would be a short lived one. 

“Dustin,” Steve said into the walkie talkie, voice cool and detached, unwavering despite the way he couldn’t steady his fingers. They twitched just barely, less than when he really needed a cigarette, but enough to make his grip on the device unstable. “Dustin, pick up you shithead.” His heart was beating so fast he didn't think he could feel it anymore, he thought that maybe it had actually stopped and this was his end. To die of terror, after all he'd been through would really cap off his life.

“Steve?” Mrs. Henderson’s sweet voice poured through the speaker, cutting out a little too early. It picked back up in the second half of her next sentence, “-didn’t know you had one of these things, too.”

Of all the incredibly few times Dustin had to forget his damn walkie talkie, it had to be the one time Steve actually needed him. “Uh, Mrs. Henderson?” He asked, trying to keep his voice steady, trying not to scream in frustration at what his life had become, trying not to take out everything on an innocent mother. “Where’s Dustin?”

“Oh,” her voice crackled through the speaker as she got the hang of operating it, “I thought he’d be with you, dear, he said something about being with that Maxine? You know, the one whose brother went missing, poor thing.”

That word, _brother_ made Steve want to retch. That word and that blood in the snow. 

“Thanks, Mrs. Henderson, but I have to go,” he said, trying not to snap at an innocent bystander. The walkie talkie crackled and hissed in his palm, like a dying animal. 

The world swum around him, thick and sluggish and leaving his memory as soon as it arrived. He made it through Hawkins without remembering a second of the drive, wondering how he managed not to kill himself or anyone else. He was on an autopilot he hadn’t known he’d had. It was second nature to find the kids first, and he wasn’t sure why. Why it was those stupid kids over Hopper.

He didn’t remember until he was just down Cherry Lane. 

Neil Hargrove. He’d driven his bat repeatedly through the truck of someone who beat his own son. He’d come face to face with a monster in human skin and managed to escape without a scratch. Showing up again meant certain death, but he honestly couldn’t figure out if it was him who would perish or if it would be Neil. 

Steve had his bat in the passenger seat.

There weren’t any cars in the driveway, when he pulled up. Just four bikes propped in thin snow. He remembered it, then, that he was only eighteen. That he was young, that he was supposed to be flying through town with a beautiful girl, that he was supposed to feel invincible and free and happy. That at the very least, he was supposed to be able to look at a boy with blue eyes and a hot temper and be able to admit to himself that he loved him. These kids weren’t supposed to be holed up in the house of a monster because a boy went missing _again._

He wasn’t sure how Dustin conned his way into the Hargrove house after being an accomplice to a crime, but he wasn’t about to question that. 

The front door he approached loomed like a monster in the woods, ominous and hiding something. Steve knew what that house hid, what stories the walls could tell. 

Billy hadn’t ever told him the specifics. Had never explained how, or _why_ he had bruises on his ribs and fear behind his eyes. He’d just shown up a few times, hurt and broken and angry at the world and allowed Steve to almost love him with calloused hands and a mirrored harm. 

Steve always had a pretty good imagination. From daydreams in classes that couldn’t hold his attention for more than a minute to nightmares that filled his sleep after the end of the world. The sight of a man with an ugly mustache dragging _his_ Billy across the carpet by his hair, or giving him that black eye with a swift punch, or those boot shaped bruises Billy had shown up with too frequently was burned into Steve’s eyelids as much as a flowering face of another monster was. He didn’t need to be told what happened behind that closed door, to know.

He wondered if the world dropped off, in the back of the Hargrove house. If everything stopped when he stepped up to that door. If the ground crumbled and broke off and left him there, in a place that could only be described as Hell in white shingling. 

There were Billy’s scraped up and burnt shoulder blades in those windows, adolescent rage in the door, the betrayal of a parent in the living room. Steve had only seen the aftermath, but boy, could he imagine. He could hate. He could hate the man who he’d seen in that driveway, who’d ended one of the only good things that Steve had had.

He hadn’t loved Billy, but he couldn’t keep the anger and sickness from creeping up him when he approached that house. Couldn’t help but thinking maybe he wanted to fall in love with a broken boy with scars and bruises and a temper, even if he’d told Dustin it was overrated. Even if he wasn’t supposed to even like Billy Hargrove. Even if everything in him told him that Billy was _trouble,_ that even if he ever got so see him again it was possibly one of the worst ideas Steve had ever had.

“Hey, Mrs. Hargrove,” Steve said fake, parent-pleasing smile plastered on his lips. He watched as she struggled to recognize him, thankful when there was only blankness. She smiled at him, meek and mild and charmed, and Steve couldn’t keep his stomach from rolling. It was all he could do to keep his lunch from coming up on the doorstep.

Billy Hargrove spelled _Trouble_ with the letters of his name, with burning fingers on Steve’s skin, with the melody of a speeding Camaro, with melancholy and anger on pink lips. He was a burning fire, melting snow as it landed on a wicked smile, sucking the chill from Steve’s hands in a bed that seemed made for them, burning his way into Steve’s cracked open ribs and wrapping cruel hands around a damaged heart and cauterizing it back together in a amalgamation of what it had been before Nancy.

“You’re damaged goods, pretty boy,” Billy had groaned into Steve’s ear with one of those burning hands wrapped around his cock in the back of his Camaro at the quarry one night, “What the fuck makes you think I want to deal with your shit?”

At the time, Steve hadn’t looked past it, hadn’t looked deeper into the harsh ocean contained in a young man, hadn’t thought of how what they were doing would affect Billy. Had only thought of hands on him and how Billy Hargrove was possibly more damaged than he could ever be, if his behavior had anything to do with it.

It had been back when they first started, when Steve hadn’t quite gotten himself in check and was getting to feel a little more like a boyfriend than either boy was okay with. Their third time together, when things had become almost planned from the foreplay that was too-rough basketball. 

“You haven’t kept your damn hands off me since the halloween party, Hargrove,” Steve had said, forehead pressed against Billy’s as he rocked into their hands, their alcoholic breath mingled in the confined space, “You _want_ me.”

Billy had groaned again, low and half a bitter laugh, “Someone’s cocky.” He’d cast his eyes downward to prove his point, flicking them back up and dragging his tongue across sharp teeth in the way they both knew drove Steve mad with lust and only partially misplaced hatred. 

“I’m right,” he’d used that charm that he’d been known for before Nancy, used on Nancy until she’d left him bleeding for the creep that took pictures of their first time. He’d used that sly smile that everyone knew meant _sex._ Bedroom eyes that had made _King Steve_ irresistible even though Steve had left the original king behind long ago. 

He’d been some weird amalgamation of what he’d been before her, mixed with changes brought by Nancy and the kids and irreparably changed by a boy with a bad home life and hard muscles and hands that Steve was pretty sure he could lose himself in if he wasn’t careful. 

“ _King Steve,_ ” Billy had needled when they’d finished and he’d let Steve leave an arm draped around him even if he wasn’t _that kind of guy, Harrington._ “ _King Steve,_ ” he’d said again, an entitled hand gripping Steve’s jean clad thigh as they glowed in a post-sex haze, before they’d come to their senses and abandoned each other to their demons.

“Don’t fucking call me that, man.”

“I’ll call you whatever I want, _King Steve,_ ” Billy had had a cigarette in those sharp teeth, wicked smile ready to latch onto Steve’s throat and rip it out. “What the hell did that Wheeler bitch do to break you, pretty boy, why the fuck do you think I’m gonna pick up the pieces? Where’d the _King_ go?”

And Steve had been too offended, too stuck in that desire to be the white knight, to get that troubled Billy Hargrove had been trying to connect with him in a way that wasn’t weird hate sex. 

“Shut the fuck up, Hargrove. Shut the fuck up, or I’m getting out of this damn car. You don’t know shit about me.”

“Harrington,” he’d said, deep voice deadly serious, “Don’t kid yourself, you _want_ me to put you in your place. This wouldn’t be happening if you wanted some pretty bitch to placate you. _You_ chose _me,_ like a damn bitch in heat, don’t forget it.”

Billy had kissed him, then, after dropping his cigarette out the window. With a strong hand on Steve’s jaw to hold him in place and lips so soft Steve had to think he used chapstick. His mouth had been warm, that wagging tongue insistent but his breath catching in his chest when Steve kissed him back.

When Steve had made it home that night, his hands had shook and his whole being had been cold, like the impending doom had finally come. Like the world was maybe ending again, and this time it was because of a boy made of sharp bones and harsh words and Steve’s seeming inability to leave feelings out of sex now that Nancy had ruined him. Like the world was ending again, and it was because trouble had found him and trouble had blond hair and trouble had kissed him so deep Steve had forgotten that everything was wrong and trouble had barely been human at the same time he’d been so human and so broken behind the eyes that Steve wasn’t sure what was the truth anymore.

He hadn’t realized it had been their first kiss until Billy’d disappeared. He’d gotten so used to kissing that boy that he didn’t notice a start until it stopped. Until he couldn’t get it anymore. 

He didn’t _like_ Billy. 

That house made his blood run cold, then burning hot. Made his hands curl into hard fists, ready for another fight in the constant battle that seemed to be his life. 

“Is Dustin here?” He asked the woman who had never stood up for her step son, a woman that only made Steve able to think of those dagging burns on Billy’s back and the idea he’d never even get to see them scarred over. A woman that he thought, was nearly as bad as that monster she took up residence with. He hated her, like he hated demodogs, controlled by their ring leader even if they weren’t as bad as the Flayer thing. Billy hadn’t told him anything, ever, but Steve knew that this woman in front of him was at fault, too.

He kept his fake smile in place, but Susan never got the chance to answer.

“Steve?” Max asked, freckled face peeking out from behind the hallway wall, “What are you doing here?” She dared him with those eyes that mirrored Billy’s, questioning what was so important he would dare show up there after what he’d done. 

“Dustin’s mom needs him home,” he lied, shooting her a look that meant only one thing. Watched as the realization washed over her pointed features, those eyes that he almost couldn’t stand to look at widening. 

She nodded, “Come get him, then.” 

“I’m sorry to hear about your son,” he said, looking her in blue eyes that just could’ve been related to Billy’s as he slipped further into that house behind Max. It was a test, daring her to spill what she knew of him, of his disappearance, of her husband. He held her gaze for longer than necessary, searching for a hint. 

“He wasn’t my son,” she said, “But thank you.”

_Wasn’t._

English had never been Steve’s best subject, but the past tense didn’t escape him.

He looked at that curly haired kid on the floor of Max’s room and wondered when he got so old. 

Steve could remember the day that his mother came home from one of his father’s business trips and Steve had been taller than her. By just a hair, but he’d grown overnight and the nanny he’d had for those times his parents fled Hawkins had been short and he’d always been taller than her. He had no clue what happened to that nanny, he hadn’t ever known that the last time she’d hugged him goodbye was the last time. 

Steve could remember pinprick tears behind his usually cold mother’s eyes when she looked at her only son and realized she’d missed half his life. Spent long enough away that he’d overtaken her. He could remember her cold hand on his still bony shoulder and said, _look, Steven, you’ve gotten so big._

But that curly haired kid wasn’t growing up without Steve, but he was doing it whenever Steve looked away. The second his eyes were averted, focused on something else, that kid grew up. Grew into someone who had lived through hell and still threw his arms around his best friends’ shoulders. Who consorted with a girl who had chosen his best friend over him, who plotted _something_ for a teenager he hated solely because said girl had taken to pulling out strands of her long hair when she wasn’t paying attention and Steve was losing his mind in a world that was oblivious to his destruction.

Steve thought that maybe, he would’ve accepted the end of the world when he was that age, if it gave him friends like that. He and Tommy had been something, but they hadn’t ever had a bond like _that._ The kind that comes with facing your own mortality.

He thought that maybe it was those kids he went to because they hadn’t known. Hopper had _known_ about the horrors that took place in that house. He’d known and hadn’t stopped it, when he was the only one who could. Those kids couldn’t.

They all turned to him when he followed Max into her room, eyes wide and too aware for their age.

He didn’t have to say it. He did anyway. “It’s back.” 

He didn’t say, _and I think it’s got Billy, whatever is left of him._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking a while to update! Midterms really kicked my ass. I'm hoping to write more before finals roll around.

“Steven,” the guidance counsellor had said, glasses slipping down her nose as she read through Steve’s abysmal grades. 

“It’s Steve,” he’d snapped, unintentionally harsh. 

“You’re failing three classes,” she’d continued anyway, thin lips twisted like just seeing a student like him made her taste something sour, “If you don’t get your grades up, all the schools you applied to last fall will have to reject you.”

He’d looked at her then, really looked at her for the first time since he’d been called into her office. Watched as her lips shifted uncomfortably at his silence, at his blatant refusal to follow the social norm of bestowing her with the usual respect, at his sunglasses that perched on his nose despite being indoors. When he finally said it, admitted it without meaning to, he could feel his whole body relax. Cave in like a crashing wave. “I don’t want to go to college.”

It hadn’t surprised her. There had been no shocked gasp, no sharp inhale and angered words like he’d have gotten from his father. “That’s fine, Steven,” she’d said, pushing those glasses back up her nose, “But you still want to graduate, don’t you? You have to get your grades up. We can get you a tutor.”

That night, in the lavender snow under the light of a full moon, with a flask in one hand and Billy’s hips between his knees Steve admitted it again. 

“I’m not going to college,” he’d said as the midnight world tipped around him. Cold metal of his Beemer chilled his ass to the bone, grounding him in the winter when all he could see was _summer._ All he could breathe and think and do was _Billy,_ right there in front of him. 

“I don’t fucking care, pretty boy,” he’d said as he swept the flask from Steve’s hand and took a swig, “I’m not your damn girlfriend, I don’t wanna hear all your pansy fuckin’ problems.”

But Billy had kissed him back when Steve had pulled him in by the belt loops of his too-tight jeans. Ground Steve’s hips into the hood on his car sharply. Billy never did anything _nicely._

Steve could have sworn, in that peaceful moment of whiskey-soaked lips on lips, the way Billy started off as hungry teeth but cooled to something nearly resembling softness, that Billy _did_ give a shit. He hadn’t kidded himself into believing that they were something more than sex, but the back of his mind itched to tell him that maybe that’s what he wanted.

But he’d told Billy that secret, one he couldn’t tell anyone else in his life without facing some extended lecture, because he’d known what the response would be. He needed that uncaring nature, he needed someone to tell him that nothing mattered, because even when hopeless nihilism took him over after the world had ended and left him behind, Billy’s easy brand of it reconciled his empty mind. Made it easy to say _fuck it, nothing matters, I can do this._

Nothing mattered, so he didn’t have to go to college like his father wanted. Nothing mattered, so he could fuck someone he didn’t want to like. Nothing mattered, so he could wait around for someone he was using to fix himself or break him further to burn the heart Nancy had broken. Nothing mattered, so he could taste the cigarettes on Billy’s tongue and revel in it, he could maybe just _survive._

Billy made everything else hard. But he made _existing_ easy. Unapologetically him, let Steve play with that himself. Billy never expected shit like Nancy had, and it set Steve free.

 

The kids shoved their bikes and selves into Steve’s car in a frantic rush after Max gave a half-hearted excuse to her mother. The trunk couldn’t close over all the bikes, hanging open and banging down like harsh jaw over every pothole. Oh, how his father would resent him if he could see Steve now, a pretty birthday present getting scuffed by rusty bikes as tires spun through slushy snow. Had he seen the wild brown eyes, the white fingers in a death grip on the steering wheel, heard the faint reverberation of _fuck_ echoing from Steve’s lips in a cacophony of kid’s screaming voices. 

Steve could hear himself yelling back at the kids, but he wasn’t actually sure what he was saying other than the string of expletives that always dropped from his lips in times like those. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard it hurt, his knuckles protesting as they turned white. He couldn’t breathe in the discombobulated noise, couldn’t _think._ So he drove. He drove and remembered all the times he knew of the danger that lay behind the curtains of the house he and some kids were fleeing.

He remembered the cool winter chill of January, freezing his nose and lips and fingertips. He remembered the night Billy showed up for the second time at his home.

 _Imagine that_ he’d thought that night, _Billy Hargrove, on my doorstep, with tear tracks on his cheeks._

Billy Hargrove was bleeding fists and bitten lips, he’d been _Trouble_ with tears behind his eyes. He’d shown up on Steve’s doorstep that night, the second time, with only a tee shirt under that brown leather jacket. He’d shown up with blood on his face and shining blue eyes and lips set in stone. 

Steve hadn’t even bothered to say anything, just stepped to the side and gone to grab another of his mother’s fancy hand towels. He hadn’t protested when Billy took some of his mother’s good vodka from the freezer and dumped it on the crosshatched _burn_ on the palm of his left hand then downed a long drag of it. 

And because he was _brave,_ because he was a _mom friend_ like Dustin insisted, Steve stepped forward and took Billy’s hand in his own. Because he had a _death wish_ he’d wrapped that hand in the towel his mother wouldn’t even dry the dishes with. Because he was _stupid_ he’d kissed Billy after, _soft_ like he was with Nancy when she used to cry over Barb. Because he was an _idiot_ he’d reached up and wiped away the lonely tear that had managed to slip from Billy’s eye at the sharp pain of alcohol on a fresh burn. 

When they seperated, Steve had said, “I’ve got hydrogen peroxide, I would’ve gotten it if you’d asked, dumbass,” at the same time that Billy had spat, “Don’t treat me like some small town bitch, Harrington.”

“What the fuck does that mean, man?” 

“It _means,_ ” Billy said, deep and mean, like Steve was an idiot for not knowing, “Don’t fucking do that shit. Kiss me like this means something.”

Steve couldn’t stand that the words _hurt._ That he was so easy to read that Billy caught on the second he’d stung. Billy had caught on and drilled in, cornering Steve against the counter with his better hand. There had been danger in red-rimmed eyes, watching Steve like he was meat. Like he knew he could’ve done whatever he wanted and Steve would’ve gone along with it in that moment. 

“Hit me, pretty boy,” Billy had said, with his hips trapping Steve against his own kitchen counter, proving to Steve what he already knew. The consequence of freeing a wolf from a bear trap was that the second he turned from gnawing off his own leg he would turn to bite you instead. But Steve had been bitten before, and Billy Hargrove didn’t scare him anymore. He was a wolf himself, he could bite back when he wanted. 

Steve had sworn those sharp canines grew sharper the moment Billy flashed them. “You were gonna on the court, today. Saw it in your eyes, _Stevie,_ why didn’t you? You should’ve,” Billy had taunted, pushing Steve back farther. 

That day on the court, Billy had been ruthless. He’d been vibrating out of his skin, moving _too_ fast, too sharp, knocking Steve down at every turn. Taunting him with every blow. He’d ignored everyone but Steve, knocking them over as well but forcing Steve to stay on his toes the whole practice. Steve had been pissed, mostly, but turned on at the same time. He wasn’t sure there was anyone else in the world who could make him so hate-filled and simultaneously horny as easily as Billy could.

Steve had hung back after the rest of the team had finished showering, expecting Billy to as well and after the show on the court, shove him into some wall and take whatever he’d so desperately wanted. But Billy had been out of the locker room before the rest of them had even showered, his car long gone by the time Steve made it out to the Beemer.

“I’m not gonna hit you.” Because even Steve knew this was some fucked-up way of coping. Trying to start another fight to feel something else. 

“You used to be down for a fight. What, now that I’ve had your dick in my mouth you’re gonna be a pussy? I’m telling you to. Just hit me, _princess._ ”

“That’s fucked up, Hargrove.”

But Billy had dropped to his knees with blood still staining his teeth, something behind the manic panic in his eyes. “ _We’re_ fucked up, _baby._ ”

He hadn’t said _baby_ like it was supposed to be said, he’d said it with venom instead of sweetness. He’d said it to wound.

There wasn’t much Steve liked to actively think about. He’d always been okay with skating through life on his predetermined path. Being an asshole and getting girls and drinking and partying and Tommy Fucking Hill. But the world had ended and Billy Hargrove had blown into town and gone missing and the world might be ending again and all he had were some stupid kids. 

But when he looked at Billy, his eyes got stuck through a haze of smoke. That wicked grin, those sharp teeth, that obnoxious tongue that peaked out just to taunt him. When he looked at Billy, anger bubbled beneath his skin and he couldn’t stop _thinking._ Hating, and trying to hold onto that hatred as it slipped through his fingers like hot California sand.

Billy wasn’t _easy._ Not like Nancy had been, all caught in their respective roles and playing house with what turned out to be unreciprocated warm love. Nancy had been warm sweaters in cold nights, hot tea by her bed when he snuck through the window like a thief in the night, doe eyes and easy beauty, soft curves under his strong fingers, soft voices covering inner determination and roughness.

She’d broken his heart, but even that had been in the script. 

Billy wasn’t any of that. He was hard and rough, angry and mean. He was cigarette smoke in winter air, bruised fists and a scarred back, a harsh shove on the basketball court, a fire so hot he burned Steve’s fingertips. 

He’d made Steve _think_ in a way Nancy never had to. He wasn’t in the script, he was so far away from everything Steve had been taught to be that it was more intoxicating than any blunt he’d pulled from a pocket of that worn leather jacket. He’d made Steve give half a shit again, after the world had ended and Steve had been lost in the abyss of figuring out what it all meant.

The worst part, Steve thought, was that no matter what Billy was to him, he’d never be the same to Billy. Though, maybe that was the best part, as well.

But he was the bandaid on Billy’s broken ribs, holding in the scar superficially, bracing against an inevitable rip from the skin. The kind of broken Steve wouldn’t ever be able to mend. Billy was the kind of guy who sucked his dick after getting called a faggot, just to rebel against someone else. Where Steve had accepted his role in the word, Billy had rejected it all violently. 

Steve was always a bit of a fixer, a mom, a guy who just wanted everything to be okay in the end, but there wasn’t anything he got to do that would fix what lay behind Billy’s cracked sternum.

Billy hadn’t ever _needed_ Steve, and maybe that was part of the appeal.

With his hands gripping his steering wheel and Dustin hollering in his ear about demodogs and monsters and things that go bump in the night, Steve hated Billy. For a minute, he hated Billy almost as much as he hated Neil. 

Because Steve thought, _This was the start of our story._

Steve thought, _You don’t get to do shit like that and then leave_

Thought, _Why can’t I ever catch a break?_

Hopper and El were expecting them, when Steve and the kids roared up the long, dirt driveway to the cabin. Or, at least, El was expecting them and had warned Hopper beforehand.

The Beemer had barely stopped by the time Steve threw it into park, the kids piling out, yelling and screaming at the two figures in front of the cabin. Steve could taste blood, creeping up the back of his throat and between his teeth, threatening to let loose what he’d thought had been released on Neil Hargrove’s pickup. 

“You _knew,_ ” he yelled, much louder than he’d meant to as soon as he reached Hopper, “How long did you know it was open?”

And Hopper just sighed and said, “Come inside.”

When they were all stuffed into the tiny cabin, satiated for the time being on disillusioned ideas of answers, Hopper said, “El and I found the new rips three days ago.”

“Billy’s been in there for _five_ days.”

Hopper looked at him with pity in sad blue eyes, and Steve couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand the implication in those eyes, in Hopper’s refusal to acknowledge the truth. That Billy Hargrove hadn’t run away, that he was either dead or nearly there. Steve could see Hopper’s discomfort at his overt desire to find Billy, at his sharpened anger and softened pain. 

He could feel it, in his chest and his cheeks and his own shifting eyes, that Hopper _knew._ That Hopper had figured them out, somehow. Steve could feel it, carved in his forehead in a way he never had before, but knew Billy had felt every waking minute. He could feel it, branding him a word he had stopped saying after Nancy had taught him differently, after Billy had shown him the bruises left on his skin and on his being, shown him what it was to be those words and be unapologetic about it. But he knew how much Billy hated that part of himself sometimes, when he got real quiet or refused to stay longer than it took to get off, when he said _I’m not your damn, girlfriend, pretty boy._ He knew he loved it, too, when he took his time and did stupid shit like _smile_ with his lips around Steve’s cock.

Steve could feel it, could feel a shame he hadn’t ever really felt before. Fear, sure, he knew fear intimately every time they messed around at the quarry in a small town. In a town where people could show up beaten or dead for being what he and Billy were. In a town where the chief of police had him figured out with just a look. Because Steve was learning, like Billy had long ago, that people who hated you didn’t need you to tell them. They could figure it out from something tiny, like your walk or the way you spoke or the way your eyes lingered when they shouldn’t or the was you cared too much about a missing local you supposedly hated. They didn’t need you to be branded for them to see it. 

But Steve dared him, dared Hopper because he couldn’t find it in himself to care. He’d have shouted it from the roof of the police station if it meant Billy would show up alive. He dared Hopper to say something about it, to be the expected homophobe, but he didn’t. Hopper just narrowed his eyes and looked away.

“I’m going in,” Steve said, even though the world shifted to that dank place when he closed his eyes, even though his heart started to race in the worst way when he said it, “Alone.” He’d never thought of himself as brave, but it didn’t matter. Someone needed to find Billy, and no one else was willing to do it.

“Uh, Steve? Not happening. We’re going in with you,” Dustin asserted, in that young confidence he almost always dripped with. With that stubborn conviction that they were still stuck in some sort of sick game. With the innocence that allowed him to believe that they were invincible, despite the piling evidence that they weren’t. “Right guys?”

The murmur of agreement seemed deafening in the close quarters of the cabin, but before Steve could protest, Hopper did. “No one is going in there.” His eyes narrowed when the landed on Steve. “Including you, Harrington, it’s too dangerous.”

When Steve’s eyes connected with Hopper’s, and he said, “Fine,” they both knew it was a lie. They both knew that the second Steve was out of that cabin, he’d be crawling through a gaping wound in the snow. That the two of them were more similar than they’d admit, that Hopper would come too, eventually, because neither one could ever leave someone stranded in hell and sleep fine with it. 

“I’m bringing you guys home. Now,” Steve addressed the rest of the room, ignoring the annoyed groans as he got up and left the cabin, not bothering to check to see if they were following. He knew they would follow, like baby ducklings behind their mother, to satiate their taste for adventure. They were too drawn to it, without the healthy amount of fear Steve had accumulated over his lifetime. They had no inhibitions, despite all they had witnessed, and it still baffled Steve. 

Dustin, ever the insolent ringleader, sat firm in the passenger seat and said, “I _know_ you’re going in there the second you drop us off. I’m coming with you. We’ve been through this shit before, dude.”

And with that, Steve figured it was time to give up. That he was going to protest the whole time, because it was always his job to keep these dumbasses safe, but that by now, he knew his efforts would be futile. 

The rest of the kids, spare Mike who had stayed behind to be with El, confirmed their stubborn agreement.

That was how Steve ended up in front of a blackened wound in the snow, crunching over buried blood with his bat in hand and a swarm of junior high schoolers surrounding him. They all had their bandanas over their mouths again, eye protection shoved high on their noses, miscellaneous weapons from Steve’s trunk in their hands. The kids tied one end of a long rope to a sturdy, uneaten tree as Steve kept the other in his spare hand. Better than bread crumbs, Steve thought, but not by much.

The woods around them looked ready to swallow them whole. To eat them alive and spit out their bones without remorse. Birds cawed and screamed far in the distance, breaking any sort of safety Steve felt as they had trekked from the road.

“Do _not_ come in after me. If I don’t come back out in an hour or if something happens to this fucking rope, _get Hopper._ You little shits are _not_ going in after me. Got it?” Steve said firmly, finger pointed at Dustin despite addressing the whole group. After Dustin nodded begrudgingly, he swiveled his hand to each of the others in turn to at least get that sliver of hope that they wouldn’t follow.

With a final deep breath of non-noxious air, Steve dove into the Upside Down before he could back himself out.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter was originally gonna be a lot longer but school and work are getting to be a lot so I split it into two so that you guys could read something since I won't be able to write much till after finals.

The Upside Down was simultaneously the same and completely different from how Steve remembered it. The walls around him, formerly the eaten away tree, were that sickly, putrid purple. The stench of it all, of death and Billy’s cologne and musty dampness and singed flesh, all the same but completely different, clawed its way through the thin red bandana that covered Steve’s nose. Choked him as it slithered down his throat like a parasite.

He could retch, then, but he held it down.

The rope in his hand was thick and prickly, making his palm itch. It was the only thing that was real in the wide expanse of dead forest before him. It was the only thing that kept him grounded, so he gripped it until his fingers turned white as he waded through layers of dead leaves. 

It hadn’t snowed in the Upside Down, and Steve wasn’t sure if it ever would. It looked the same as it had when he’d seen it before, damp and musty with those flakes of not-snow hovering in the cold air. It smelled the same, too, like death and decay. 

When Steve was seven, he’d had a goldfish. He’d won it at the county fair, and kept it in a tiny bowl full of tap water. Two days later, it had died, but he hadn’t checked on it until his mother complained of a smell coming from his room. The hell dimension he was in now smelled just like poor Goldy had, floating bloated in putrid water.

He’d hated the cologne Billy wore when they first started whatever the fuck they were doing. The cloying smell wasn’t even that _bad,_ Steve could recognize expensive, overpriced shit when he wanted. Billy wore too much of it, suffocating him in with everything about Billy. 

Shoved in the closet of some party, all gnashing teeth and sharp bites and mean tongues, he’d lashed out for the thrill of the fight. Billy hadn’t been able to keep his hands off Steve, not when he’d gotten a taste and a can or two of beer in his system. Steve had been able to push and push, and get pushed back, and it had been better than he’d ever expected. They’d fought to pin the other, to prove something, to exist in an understandable anger.

“You smell like shit, Hargrove,” Steve had spat, mean because he _could be._ Angry for the fun of it. Harsh because he wasn’t supposed to do any of that. He wasn’t supposed to have fight sex with a boy that sang _trouble._ He had been so sick of doing what he was supposed to, with a broken heart and an already proven penchant for mischief, he wanted the pain with his pleasure.

Nancy had never liked that. She wanted sickly sweetness and loving touches and fake happiness. And he’d loved it, like he loved her. Steve could be sweet, so sickly he deserved to be in a sappy high school movie. She didn’t push back or hit back unless Steve really fucked up, like that time at the theatre. But _Billy._ Billy fought mean, with harsh hips and sharp lips and hands that nearly bruised when he pushed Steve against a cramped wall and jerked him off like it was a fucking race. 

Billy had always like to end up with his hand around Steve’s throat, but the latter had started to notice he turned into a whining _bitch_ when he did the same.

“For a rich boy, you have no fucking taste, Harrington,” Billy had snarled against Steve’s neck before he bit down. 

The next time they clashed, Billy wore a different cologne.

Steve could swear he could smell it, as he crept deeper in that dead woods, even though he knew it had been much too long for a scent to linger. 

“ _Steve,_ ” the voice was loud, frantic, but drowned out blood pounding in Steve’s ears at the stillness of the air around him. Steve _knew_ it was Billy, and _knew_ it wasn’t really. It was the monstrous environment playing tricks on him. He knew it wasn’t real. It was the hum of silence and blood in his ears and his mind playing tricks on him. He never was sure how the whole Mind Flayer thing worked, but he figured it was probably that. 

Steve hadn’t wandered into hell to find Billy alive. He’d known what to expect, with crusted blood in the snow and his knowledge of Neil Hargrove’s violent streak and Billy’s escapism and the soul sucking nature of the Upside Down. He’d gone in to find Billy’s body, because he knew it would be there. Getting his hopes up wasn’t an option, he’d known Billy was dead the minute he’d found out he was missing.

“You ever gonna tell me how you got that?” He’d asked, thumb running over a pale, puckered scar on Billy’s thigh. It was big and perfectly round, too round to have the same kind of origin as the scars that littered Steve’s own flesh.

“What makes you think you deserve to know, Harrington?” Billy’s asked, pushing Steve’s hand from where it rested on his bare thigh in the back of the Beemer. The cigarette in his fingers glowed gently as he took a deep inhale. He hadn’t bothered to blow it out the window, even though Steve always complained about the smell later. 

“One, you’ve had my dick in your ass, dickhead. Two, I told you all mine already. I think I deserve a little reciprocation.” 

“That’s a big word, pretty boy, where’d you learn it?”

“Fuck off.”

Long after Steve had thought the topic had been dropped, Billy had been on his second cigarette. They weren’t touching, not since Billy pushed him away. Steve couldn’t help it, he was a toucher. His fingers had itched to get back onto Billy’s warm skin. 

“Dad used to smoke cigars,” Billy had said as his own finger ghosted over the scar. Steve didn’t have to ask what he meant, or why he was saying it then.

That was the moment he’d learned that Billy usually answered the questions he’d asked, it was just always on his own time. That if he was patient, as soon as he’d forgotten he’d asked, he’d get an answer.

He never liked the answers, though.

That was also the moment he learned of his own hatred for the elder Hargrove.

That night had been cloudy and dark, all the country stars snuffed out like candles at church. Steve hadn’t known what they were, what anything meant, other than Billy was a good fuck and he wouldn’t give a shit what Steve did, ever. That even if they fought like hell and couldn’t stand each other, there wasn’t anyone else like Billy in his life. Who didn’t expect anything of him.

The word _boyfriend_ had swirled in his head, stubborn as an ox. Stubborn as the boy it could refer to. Steve hadn’t known anything, then, worse than usual. _I’m not your bitch, Harrington. _But the air tasted of cigarettes and Billy’s cologne long after Steve had been abandoned to the night by him. It was fresh and cold, before everything had gone to shit, and Steve had been able to taste snow on his tongue when he’d finally pulled the Beemer from its parking spot at the quarry.__

__He didn’t even _like_ Billy._ _

__A hand grabbed the sleeve of his jacket, startling Steve from his hunt for the voice. He didn’t even scream, like he should’ve, when he was hauled into the rigid chest of whatever grabbed him. Too familiar to be anything else._ _

__“What the fuck, Hargrove-” he started, cut off roughly by a shove away from said familiar chest._ _

__“God, it fucking sucks that you aren’t real,” Billy said, backing away after what felt like barely a second. He was coated in black goo, barely here, hunched and in pain. A ghost in the fog, only sturdied by the dark haze of the underworld._ _

__It was all happening too fast. Steve couldn’t even breathe in this hellhole, let alone with Billy Fucking Hargrove, asshole extraordinaire, who probably wasn’t even real, staring him down with dead blue eyes._ _

__“What the _fuck_ are you talking about, man?” Steve asked, incredulous and grabbing tight to Billy’s messy jacket sleeve. He half believed that he could follow this ghost to the _real_ Billy. This wasn’t it. This _couldn’t_ be it. Nothing was ever this easy for Steve Harrington. _ _

__“Damn,” Billy yelled into the woods around them, loud and full of dampened fire. The flames Steve had grown accustomed to were dimming, low and defeated. They flickered out like he’d never witnessed before. Those blue eyes were blank, empty. Lackluster. He wasn’t _real._ The Billy Hargrove Steve knew and hated and gave a shit about didn’t _ever_ have empty eyes. They had always been full of something._ _

___He wasn’t real._ _ _

__He was _trouble,_ coated in blood and black sludge, with wicked sharp teeth that shone in the darkness. _ _

__Billy continued, no longer even looking at Steve as he yelled, arms flung open and wide and no longer even touching Steve, “You finally figured out how to make him fucking _talk._ Color me impressed, bitches.”_ _

__“What the _fuck_ are you talking about?” Steve yelled back, just as loud as Billy and even more confused than the first time he asked. _ _

__“Shut _up,_ pretty boy, you’re not even really here,” Billy snarled, almost like how he would’ve on the outside. His voice was raw and cracked, from the cold and the poison air and all the _yelling_ Steve knew he’d been doing._ _

__“What the fuck are you on about, man? _You’re_ the one who isn’t real. _You’re_ probably dead, somewhere around here, and this is just some fucked up Mind Flayer shit.”_ _

__“Uh, _no,_ even if you were dead, too, and not some fuckin’ hallucination Satan is making me fucking see again. You wouldn’t have ended up in Hell, Harrington. Too much of a damn goodie two shoes for this shit.”_ _

__“ _What?_ ” Steve asked, even more confused than he usually was with this whole thing. He reached out for Billy, wrapped a hand around his wrist before Billy violently yanked it away, “You aren’t in _Hell,_ dumbass. Fucking come with me.” They needed to leave, to flee the scene before they were found. Before the monsters that led Billy to be covered in sticky black blood caught them and drug them deeper into the noxious woods._ _

__Steve still hadn’t found a body, but the absolute _bullshit_ flowing out of Billy’s mouth made him almost believe everything was real, and that _maybe_ Billy wasn’t dead and that this wasn’t all another cruel trick the world was playing on him. _ _

__“ _Billy_ ” Max screamed, shrill and angry as she dropped the rope and rushed at her step brother. The second she reached him, she reached up and gave him a quick slap across the dirty cheek. Steve could almost see the steam coming from her ears. _ _

__“ _Fuck,_ Maxine, you little shithead. What the fuck was that for?” He asked, fire returning in a little puff of smoke. Nowhere near what it would’ve been had they been in the real world. _ _

__“I thought you were _dead._ Or that you went home. _Without me,_ ” she kept yelling, inviting the monsters of the world to come and find them, with their collective noise. _ _

__“No, no, no. I told you to stay the hell out of here,” Steve hissed at Dustin, who was watching the whole thing with curious wide eyes, “Can’t you ever fucking listen to me?”_ _

__“Dude, the rope went slack. Don’t bitch at _me,_ we were gonna come save your ass from the demodogs.”_ _

__He was right, after all, with the rope in his own hands. Steve hadn’t even realized he’d dropped it in the frenzy of seeing Billy. Of catching him like the wild animal he was._ _

__“ _Fine._ Whatever. Sorry,” he said, ruffling the curls on Dustin’s head despite the residual anger and fear that curled in his chest over being joined by Max and Dustin. “Lucas and Will?”_ _

__“Will couldn’t go in. You know. Mind Flayer stuff. Lucas stayed back. Pairs are better, Steve.”_ _

__Steve nodded at that, then turned back to the arguing siblings. “Guys! _Guys,_ let’s get out of here,” he yelled, grounding the siblings enough to make everyone remember where they were. _ _

__The world around them screeched, slow and loud like it was dying. It pushed them into motion, sent them after the rope. Steve could feel his tennis shoes slipping on the dead earth below him as they scrambled back to the tree. In front of him, Max was yelling instructions to Billy on how to get out the second they got to the rip. Mid-sentence, he grabbed her roughly and shoved her through the opening with grimey fists in her jacket and a loud curse. Her angry shriek cut off halfway through as she escaped into the real world._ _

__Dustin climbed through next, a little unsteady on his feet and yelling _something_ that Steve couldn’t really hear of the blood rushing in his ears. Didn’t really care to hear, either._ _

__Before Steve could follow, Billy grabbed his wrist so tightly he could feel the bones there grind together. Held him there, for just a second, before violently ripping the bandana from over Steve’s mouth. Their kiss ws rough and rushed, fueled by the danger licking at their heels and the adrenaline of a chase. Billy pressed into him hard, like a man dying of thirst and Steve was the first drop of water offered._ _

__Billy’s teeth scraped along Steve’s lower lip, clumsy and rushed, but Steve couldn’t help but grab his shirt and haul him closer. It was a _real_ kiss. One Steve would’ve, _should’ve,_ saved for girls like Nancy. Girls who were wife material, who would play house with him and who he would treat right, who he could flirt with in the halls and take to his senior prom. One not meant for two angry, messed up boys to share in a hellscape, surrounded by dead trees and fearsome creatures. One that held no intention of anything further, only meant that in that moment, they couldn’t help but be pulled together like magnets on the brink of their fields._ _

__One he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually shared with Billy._ _

__“You taste like shit, Hargrove,” Steve said when Billy let go. It wasn’t _exactly_ true. Billy tasted of dirt and blood and black sludge, of a man who’d been separated from a toothbrush for five days too many, which was objectively _bad._ But he also tasted of himself, buried under the grime that coated his whole being, of cold winter nights and cigarettes in the back of Steve’s Beemer. Of familiarity and uncaring, of the chilled night sky and the bitterness of anger Steve could no longer separate from the boy in front of him._ _

__And like he knew he would, deep down in that place that he told himself had been reserved for Nancy and the subsequent heartbreak, Billy responded, “For a rich boy, you have no fucking taste, Harrington,” then pushed Steve back through the tree._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ey they finally met up in in the "present" time? Or at least not in the flashbacks. The next chapter will have a lot more Steve and Billy interaction and a lot more about what happened to Billy and stuff. Also please tell me if this chapter doesn't make sense, I'm not sure how well I portrayed my idea/Billy's reaction to Steve. Like it wasn't supposed to make a lot of sense, bc it'll be explained more late, but still.


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